Main Page | See live article | Alphabetical index

Orange (colour)

See also Orange (disambiguation) for other meanings of the word.


The colour orange occurs between red and yellow in the visible spectrum at a wavelength of about 620-585 nanometres. It is the same colour as the fruit from which it gets its name.

Oft-cursed word of poets, having no rhyming partner in English until the advent of quorange (though door-hinge is a close approximation). "Grorange" (a color of slime made by mixing orange and green slime) did appear in one novelization of the Super Mario Brothers Nintendo games. Since "orange" refers to a species of plant, anyone could hypothetically coin a new rhyme by creating a new hybrid with an orange and another species of citrus fruit and naming it (for example, a hybrid of a kumquat and an orange could be called a "korange"). "Rhymes with Orange", in reference to this famous unrhymeability, has been used as the name of a comic strip.

On a browser that supports visual formatting in Cascading Style Sheets, the following box should appear in this color:

With natural coloring materials such as paints or crayons, orange can be derived from primary colors by mixing red and yellow.

Its contrasting color is blue.

Brown is actually on the orange part of the color spectrum.