Grammar girl here, this week, Gretchen McCulloch will answer an interesting question.

Why do we call people redheads instead of orangeheads?

Once I started thinking about it, I really wanted to know why.

One of the oft-sided illogical characteristics of the English language is why we say redhead

to describe people who look like Elizabeth I, Christina Hendrix, or Anne of Green Gables.

Any logical comparison of colors would conclude that their hair is much closer in color to

orange things, like carrots and pumpkins, than to red things such as strawberries and tomatoes.

So why don't we say orangehead instead of redhead?

Etymology to the rescue.

According to Etymology Online, the word red in English dates straight back to the Proto-Indo-European

word Royd, R-E-U-D-H, via the Proto-Germanic word Royhats, R-A-U-T-H-A-Z, and is also related

to words like Ruddy and Rufus in the surname Reed, R-E-I-D.

The fact that the word for red is so old is consistent with what we know about color terms

cross linguistically.

Under black and white, red is generally the next earliest color term that a language is likely

to have.

Orange, on the other hand, only appears in English after the arrival of the fruits in England.

According to Etymology Online again, the term for the fruit shows up around 1300 AD, from

Italian, Oransia, via Arabic, Naurange, and traces back to Sanskrit, Naurangeas, meaning

orange tree.

But orange doesn't start to be used in English for the color until the 1540s, approximately

200 years later.

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