Chapter ORANGE of O by The Hobson Jobson Dictionary

to Basra, to ’Irak, and to Syria…but they lost the sweet and penetrating odour and beauty that they had in India, having no longer the benefits of the climate, soil, and water peculiar to that country.”—Mas’udi, ii. 438-9.

c. 1220.—“In parvis autem arboribus quaedam crescunt alia poma citrina, minoris quantitatis frigida et acidi seu pontici (bitter) saporis, quae poma orenges ab indigenis nuncupantur.”—Jacobus Vitriacus, in Bongars. These were apparently our Seville oranges.

c. 1290.—“In the 18th of Edward the first a large Spanish Ship came to Portsmouth; out of the cargo of which the Queen bought one frail (see FRAZALA) of Seville figs, one frail of raisins or grapes, one bale of dates, two hundred and thirty pomegranates, fifteen citrons, and seven oranges (Poma de orenge).”—Manners and Household Expenses of England in the 13th and 15th Centuries, Roxb. Club, 1841, p. xlviii. The Editor deigns only to say that ‘the MS. is in the Tower.’ [Prof. Skeat writes (9 ser. Notes and Queries, v. 321): “The only known allusion to oranges, previously to 1400, in any piece of English literature (I omit household documents) is in the ‘Alliterative Poems,’ edited by Dr. Morris, ii. 1044. The next reference, soon after 1400, is in Lydgate’s ‘Minor Poems,’ ed. Halliwell, p. 15. In 1440 we find oronge in the ‘Promptorium Parvulorum,’ and in 1470 we find orenges in the ‘Paston Letters,’ ed. Gairdner, ii. 394.”]

1481.—“Item to the galeman (galley man) brought the lampreis and oranges…iiijd.” —Household Book of John D. of Norfolk, Roxb. Club, 1844, p. 38.

c. 1526.—“They have besides (in India) the nâranj [or Seville orange, Tr.] and the various fruits of the orange species.…It always struck me that the word nâranj was accented in the Arab fashion; and I found that it really was so; the men of Bajour and Siwâd call nâranj nârank” (or perhaps rather nârang):—Baber, 328. In this passage Baber means apparently to say that the right name was narang, which had been changed by the usual influence of Arabic pronunciation into naranj.

1883.—“Sometimes the foreign products thus cast up (on Shetland) at their doors were a new revelation to the islanders, as when a cargo of oranges was washed ashore on the coast of Delting, the natives boiled them as a new kind of potatoes.”—Saty. Review, July 14, p. 57.

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