Red Onions (and every other not-red food that’s called red) is older in the English language than the word “purple”.
Purple is a relatively modern concept in English having first been used circa 900AD. Before that basically everything towards the magenta part of the spectrum was all just called red.
See also Orange, the colour is named after the fruit and not the other way round.
The concept of purple is older than English, though. I guess when English chose to adopt it is the main question, but should be clarified that the term where “purple” derives from goes back to the ancient Romans, who recognized it as a distinct color used for royalty given the difficulty in obtaining it.
It does have me wondering exactly when red onions first arrived in the UK, or what the Romans may have called it (potentially before those dirty Britons got their hands on it).
I also know that, when boiled, they yield a very rich, red color. Could maybe be named “red” due to that? Some Orthodox Christians/eastern Europeans traditionally use red onions to dye eggs for Easter.
I was always curious about this! I’m bilingual and I always get mixed up because they’re actually called “purple onions” in Spanish. I always forget which language calls it which, but knowing this is definitely helpful!
Red Onions (and every other not-red food that’s called red) is older in the English language than the word “purple”.
Purple is a relatively modern concept in English having first been used circa 900AD. Before that basically everything towards the magenta part of the spectrum was all just called red.
See also Orange, the colour is named after the fruit and not the other way round.
It’s the same reason why ”Violets are blue”.
See also: ‘robin red breast’ to describe the European robin, which very clearly has an orange breast:
Lil-red-throat in German
The concept of purple is older than English, though. I guess when English chose to adopt it is the main question, but should be clarified that the term where “purple” derives from goes back to the ancient Romans, who recognized it as a distinct color used for royalty given the difficulty in obtaining it.
It does have me wondering exactly when red onions first arrived in the UK, or what the Romans may have called it (potentially before those dirty Britons got their hands on it).
I also know that, when boiled, they yield a very rich, red color. Could maybe be named “red” due to that? Some Orthodox Christians/eastern Europeans traditionally use red onions to dye eggs for Easter.
And before that we have people looking at colours entirely differently, like Homer calling the sea the colour of red wine.
Which my Greek teacher would explain by saying “my pencil is the the same shade of yellow as your book is blue”.
Or perhaps Homer was colorblind?
I was always curious about this! I’m bilingual and I always get mixed up because they’re actually called “purple onions” in Spanish. I always forget which language calls it which, but knowing this is definitely helpful!
In Bangla, we call the color peyaji, which is basically “onion-y”. It’s also what we call onion fritters, and they’re absolutely delicious.
Edit: Just remembered that we also use it as a slang for fucking around. Not sure where that came from lol.
Yum, onion fritters!
Wow, thank you!
Now when people call me color-blind cause I don’t care about color matching or their names, I can just say I’m very old fashioned!