The first known use of "orange" to describe the fruit was recorded in the 1300s, according to Atlas Obscura. Prior to the 1500s, though, English didn't have a word for the color "orange." The two most important reasons for this are that oranges (the fruit) weren't widely available in English-speaking places until that time, and also there were very few things in an English-speaker's life colored orange. In those cases when an English speaker needed to describe the color, they would just use "yellow-red."
That changed when the fruit, which was first cultivated in China, started becoming more widely available across the English-speaking world, as the Houston Chronicle notes. The word we now pronounce as "orange" was, at first, exclusively used to describe the fruit. Indeed, the word's etymology can be traced to, among other languages, the Arabic "nāranj." The first use of the word "orange" to describe something of the same color was in 1512 (per Vocabulary.com).
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