What Did Oranges Used To Look Like? (They Weren’t Always Orange)

Still life of oranges, 1863

When we think of oranges today, we picture an almost perfectly round fruit with a sweet, citric, juicy interior that is, as the name suggests, orange in color. It’s a common fruit around the world; in the U.S., oranges consistently rank as the third-most-consumed fresh fruit behind bananas and apples — and it ranks No. 1 among juices.

But oranges weren’t always as popular or as common as they are today — and they didn’t even look the same. The oranges we’re familiar with are the result of thousands of years of cultivation and selective breeding. Here, we peel back the layers of history to discover what oranges used to look like and how they evolved into the fruit we enjoy today.

Credit: Sepia Times/ Universal Images Group via Getty Images

The Origins of Oranges

Oranges, and all other citrus fruits, can trace their roots to the southeast foothills of the Himalayas. According to DNA evidence, the first citrus trees appeared in this region about 8 million years ago; from there, they spread across the Indian subcontinent and then to south-central China. These ancient citrus fruits, however, were nothing like the oranges we know today. They were smaller, often bitter, and came in a variety of shapes and colors, from knobby, yellow fruits akin to the modern citron to large, green, smooth-skinned citruses similar to the modern pomelo.

All the oranges, lemons, limes, and grapefruits we eat today are descendants of just a handful of ancient species, namely citrons, pomelos, and mandarins, all native to South Asia and East Asia. The sweet orange we know today, which accounts for about 70% of global orange production, is a cultivated hybrid of the ancient pomelo — a large, pale green or yellow fruit with a thick rind — and ancient mandarins, which were then only a little larger than olives. That original hybrid, however, would have been quite different from the oranges we have today.

Cultivation and Selective Breeding

Modern oranges are the result of extensive selective breeding over thousands of years. Early oranges would certainly not have had the uniformity of our modern varieties, and they were likely smaller, with looser, bumpier skin. In terms of taste, they could have been bitter or sweet or anywhere in between — the first known reference to what are now called sweet oranges comes from Chinese literature from around 314 BCE.

As for the color, not all early oranges were orange, with shades of the fruit ranging from pale yellow to green. In fact, even today, many oranges remain green when ripe, particularly in warmer parts of the world, since the color of an orange is related to temperature and environment, not ripeness. Oranges turn orange due to exposure to cold, and some oranges grown in warmer climes are picked green and treated with ethylene gas to make them more orange, a process known as degreening.

Orange Oranges

By the 11th century, oranges were being grown in Southern Europe, though they had a bitter flavor and were used primarily for medicinal purposes. Sweet oranges, similar to what we typically consume today, did not appear in Europe until the 16th century. These soon caught on, beginning a period of breeding programs and intensive cultivation that began to shape the orange into a fruit more closely resembling the common modern variety.

At this point, oranges wouldn’t necessarily have been as large, as uniformly sized, or as vibrantly orange as we are used to, but they would have been very much recognizable to us. Evidence for this is amply supplied in paintings by various artists from the 16th century onward — for example, Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s “Winter” (part of the “Four Seasons” set, 1563); Willem Kalf’s “Wineglass and a Bowl of Fruit” (1663); Luis Melendez’s “Still Life with Lemons and Oranges” (circa 1760); and Vincent Van Gogh’s “Still Life with Basket and Six Oranges” (1888).

As for the word “orange,” it referred to a fruit first and a color later. The word comes from the Old French word for the citrus fruit, pomme d’orenge, which in turn is thought to have come from the Sanskrit word nāranga via the Persian and Arabic languages (hence the Spanish word for orange, naranja). The use of orange as the specific description for a color started to appear in English in the 1500s — many centuries after humans started eating actual oranges.