Ever wondered why we call people with ginger locks ‘redheads’, when their hair is clearly orange? That’s because English didn’t distinguish between red and orange until the 1540s, and we’d been using the word ‘redhead’ since the mid-1200s. So what came first, the colour or the fruit? The fruit arrived in England in the 1300s (via Italy), but it took over 200 years for orange to become both a colour and a fruit.
