Today I learned...

...that "orange" as a colour did not exist before the early 1500s.  Prior to that, that which today we call orange was simply treated as a shade of red.  This explains why so many common things bear the name red which are in fact orange.  The robin red-breast for instance, or the red deer, or even red hair - they are all closer to what we today we would call orange than true red.  The word as a colour came into being at around that time as a result of describing the particular tint of the (then relatively new) fruit called an orange. So the colour orange came from the name of the fruit rather than vice versa.