In 2012, reader Erica wrote in with a question about oranges. Is the fruit named for its color, or is the color named for the fruit? The answer to this question is actually pretty simple: Orange ...

Was the orange named because it was the color orange, or did the color get its name because of the fruit? Time to take a little language history lesson.

But as Katie Goh unravels in Foreign Fruit: A Personal History of the Orange, underneath its pitted skin, the orange contains multitudes. "Citrus is fruit that freely betrays," Goh writes.

The use of orange as the specific description for a colour is thought to have begun in the 1500s when the fruit began to regularly appear on English market stalls.

Fun fact: The oranges that you know and love today weren't always orange. In fact, America's second-favorite fruit once came in various shapes and colors many millennia ago. Beyond that, the word ...