One of the brightest spots in this dead season of produce is that tangy tautology, the orange. It's the only really edible thing in the English language that describes itself (you can eat violets, but they don't taste very good, unless you steep their roots in liquor), and is famous for rhyming perfectly with nothing, except, if you accept proper nouns, one hill in Wales called "The Blorenge."

But once you look beyond the Anglosphere, there appears a long string of words that might not really rhyme with "orange," but do sound a bit like it, following the fruit's path back through time to its Southeast Asian origins. The tree's homeland is somewhere between northeastern India and southern China, where Sanskrit-speakers (or rather, Sanskrit writers, since the language is something like the Indian version of Church Latin) called it naranga. Arab traders plying the Indian Ocean picked up the word, along with the fruit, some time in the Middle Ages, and called it naranj. And then, around 1100, the Arabs brought it across from North Africa up to Sicily, where the locals started calling it arangia.

That word worked its predictable way up the Boot, over the Alps, and over to England, where 14th-century Franco-Brits called the fruit the unwieldy pomme d'orenge. In those dark days, calling anything that grew on a tree an "apple de something" was the cool thing to do. But by the time sweet oranges hit Europe in the 1500s (the original oranges that the Arabs had brought were bitter, more popular for medicine than mimosas), the English had worked out their apple problem, and called the juicy fruit the much simpler "orange."

That might seem all hunky-dory, story-wise, but astute readers might have noticed something fishy going on: we totally lost an N! Without batting an eye, Sicilians did away with the initial consonant of the Arabic word they inherited, which, in most circumstances, would be a pretty confusing switcheroo to pull. But because of the way that English, French, and Sicilian articles (e.g., "a," "an," un, une) work, initial Ns are the redshirts of the alphabet, dying off and reappearing willy-nilly over the course of an etymological episode. "A norange" and "an orange," or un narangia and un arangia, sound almost exactly the same, which lets speakers pretty much pick at random where to draw the line. This N-muddling, called juncture loss, has also given us words like "apron" (originally "napron," like a big napkin), "nickname" (originally "eke-name"), and "newt" (originally "ewt"). Spanish, on the other hand, got to keep its naranja whole, since the A in una naranja works like a linguistic DMZ, keeping the battling Ns at bay.

In the case of "orange," the fact that there was a city in France already called Orange, named after an old Celtic settlement called Aurasio, probably helped cement the no-N version of the word in the French vocabulary. And unlikely as it might sound, given how much ancient (and prehistoric) art is predominantly orange-colored, Europe did not have a word for the color before the Arabs hit Sicily with their borrowed Sanskrit. Everyone just called it "yellow-red" in whatever language they happened to be speaking. It's a little longer, and possibly less precise, but "yellow-red" has one definite advantage over "orange": it rhymes with more than just a remote Welsh hill.