Published on 12, July, 2020
Did you know that the word for the colour orange comes from the fruit, not the other way round? https://www.omniglot.com/bloggle/?p=14856Our name for the fruit comes from the Sanskrit for the name of the tree. Other languages name the fruit after the Portuguese who traded it, or after the Chinese who first cultivated it.
I love etymology!!! Did you know that the word blue (which was often one of the last colours to be named in a language as often there were just words for different shades of green, and many languages now have multiple words for different shades of blue) has various origins - in English it comes from the Old High German word for bright and the previous word was azure (which many (Romance) languages still use) which came from the old name for the stone lapis lazuli.
Also, the word petrichor meaning the smell of dust after rain is quite a recent word, chosen during a research paper by students who wanted a word to describe that phenomenon. Petri means stone and ichor means the blood of the gods which is a really strange literal meaning of the word petrichor in my opinion, but cool nonetheless!
It's amazing to me that blue was the last to be named. I love lights and lasers and stuff, and the blue LED was invented well after the red and green. The same with lasers. Poor blue
I think it’s so funny because the sky is blue!!!! Surely you would look at the colours around you and see blue quite quickly…