Orpiment was an important item of trade in the Roman Empire and was used as a medicine in China although it contains arsenic and is highly toxic. Pigments were also made in ancient times from a mineral known as orpiment.

The colour was also used later by Medieval artists for the colouring of manuscripts. Orange carnelians were significantly used during Indus Valley civilization which was, in turn, obtained the people from Kutch, Gujarat. In Egypt, a mineral pigment called realgar was used for tomb paintings, as well as for other purposes. In ancient Egypt, and ancient India, artists used an orange colour on some of their items. Alternatively, orange things were sometimes described as red such as red deer, red hair, the Red Planet and robin redbreast. Crog also referred to the saffron colour, so that orange was also referred to as ġeolurēad ( yellow-red) for reddish orange, or ġeolucrog ( yellow-saffron) for yellowish orange. īefore this word was introduced to the English-speaking world, saffron already existed in the English language. The place-name ' Orange' has a separate etymology and is not related to that of the colour. Another early recorded use was in 1512, in a will now filed with the Public Record Office. The earliest known recorded use of orange as a colour name in English was in 1502, in a description of clothing purchased for Margaret Tudor. The French word, in turn, comes from the Italian arancia, based on Arabic nāranj ( نارنج), borrowed from Persian naarang derived from Sanskrit nāraṅga ( नारङ्ग), which in turn derives from a Dravidian root word (compare நரந்தம்/ നാരങ്ങ narandam / naranja which refers to bitter orange in Tamil and Malayalam). The word comes from the Old French: orange, from the old term for the fruit, pomme d'orange.

In English, the colour orange is named after the appearance of the ripe orange fruit. Saffron is both a spice and a widely used dye in Asia. In Asia it is an important symbolic colour of Buddhism and Hinduism. It also serves as the political colour of the Christian democracy political ideology and most Christian democratic political parties. In Europe and America, surveys show that orange is the colour most associated with amusement, the unconventional, extroversion, warmth, fire, energy, activity, danger, taste and aroma, the autumn and Allhallowtide seasons, as well as having long been the national colour of the Netherlands and the House of Orange. Similarly, the hues of autumn leaves are from the same pigment after chlorophyll is removed. These pigments convert the light energy that the plants absorb from the Sun into chemical energy for the plants' growth. The orange colour of many fruits and vegetables, such as carrots, pumpkins, sweet potatoes, and oranges, comes from carotenes, a type of photosynthetic pigment. It is named after the fruit of the same name. In the RGB colour model, it is a tertiary colour. In traditional colour theory, it is a secondary colour of pigments, produced by mixing yellow and red. Human eyes perceive orange when observing light with a dominant wavelength between roughly 585 and 620 nanometres. Orange is the colour between yellow and red on the spectrum of visible light.

True autumn vs dark autumn orange