That's why we say gingers have red hair instead of orange because we didn't have a word for orange for a while. That's also why we say robins are red breasted.
It was originally called æpplsin, or "red-yellow" in old english, and then after european empire the orange was brought to europe, and the colour of the orange represented the same colour of æpplsin, therefore we named the colour "orange".
Today I found out the color orange was named after the fruit, not the other way around. Before then, the English speaking world referred to the orange color as geoluhread, which literally translates to “yellow-red”.
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