Word Of The Issue: Glowing Fruit

The Grapevine’s guide to sounding Icelandic, one word at a time

People often say that the sun is orange. That is not because the sun is actually orange, but because it appears so to us, standing on earth. This is due to the fact that the atmosphere scatters the sunlight that reaches us, rendering it orange. If it wasn’t for the atmosphere we wouldn’t of course be here, but also, the sun would just look white, not orange. And speaking of things that only look orange, but are actually white, we could also give the President of the United States as an example. But let’s not.

Icelanders have adapted the word appelsínugulur for the colour orange. To break this down appelsína means orange in Icelandic, and gulur means yellow. This is in many ways peculiar, because that renders the literal meaning of the word as something is yellow (not orange) like an orange. In other words, we don’t really have a word for orange, we just have a word saying that something is yellow, like a type of a fruit.

However, this rabbit hole goes deeper. Appelsína, the word for orange — a fruit, like most fruits, very recent to Icelandic diet and vocabulary, having first arrived in Iceland, like the oranges themselves, in the middle of the 19th century — derives from the Danish word for an orange, dating back to the 17th century, which is appelsin, coincidentally the word we used for a long-time favourite soft drink in Iceland, which is of course, an orange soda.

In the beginning of the 20th century, it was all the rage to try to come up with new Icelandic words for things recently introduced to Iceland, and such was the case with the word for orange. Instead of using the derived Danish word, some Icelanders tried to introduce the word glóaldin, or glowing fruit. But it never caught on. But the Danes got their word for an orange from German, who got it from the Dutch, and it all seems to derive from the phrase apples from China, China often being called Sina on the continent in the 17th century.

So there you have it. The colour you are thinking of is yellow, like an apple from China.

Learn more Icelandic words hér.