Orange could be seen, but the compound was the only word there was for it in English for almost 1,000 years.

In Old English, the form of the language spoken between the 5th and 12th centuries, well before Chaucer’s Middle English, there was a word geoluhread (yellow-red). In Geoffrey Chaucer’s “Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” the rooster Chaunticleer dreams of a threatening fox invading the barnyard, whose “color was betwixe yelow and reed.” The fox was orange, but in the 1390s Chaucer didn’t have a word for it. This is not to say that no one recognized the color, only that there was no specific name for it. But there was no orange, at least before oranges came to Europe. This seems no less true for persimmon and for pumpkin. Its name also comes from a fruit, a variety of the orange, but it wasn’t until 1899 that “tangerine” appears in print as the name of a color-and it isn’t clear why we require a new word for it. There is only orange, and the name comes from the fruit. Orange, however, seems to be the only basic color word for which no other word exists in English. They are focalizing words, and are usually defined as “the smallest subset of color words such that any color can be named by one of them.” In English, for example, “red” is the basic color term for a whole range of shades that we are willing to think of (or are able to see) as red, whereas the names we give any of the individual shades are specific to them and don’t serve a similarly unifying function. These words do not describe a color they merely give it a name. In whatever language, the available color words cluster around a small category of what linguistic anthropologists often call basic color terms. Most languages have far fewer, and almost no speakers of any language, other than interior designers or cosmeticians, know more than about 100 of these. No language, however, has words for more than about 1,000 of these, even with compounds and metaphors (for example, a color term like “watermelon red” or “midnight blue”). The human eye can distinguish millions of shades of color, subtly discriminating small differences of energy along the visual spectrum.

Different words for orange color