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”.
The word orange itself was introduced to English through the
Spanish word “naranja”, which came from the Sanskrit word nāraṅga, which
literally means “orange tree”. The
English dropped the leading “n” and eventually we got the word “orange”.
In the early 16th century, the word orange gradually started
being used to not only refer to the fruit, but also what we now know of as the
color orange.
