The word travels from Dravidian, Tamil naram or Telugu narinja, through Sanskrit naranga, orange tree, Persian narang, Arabic naranj, into Italian melarancio and French pomme d'orenge. English got the fruit by the thirteenth century; a norange rebracketed into an orange, the same juncture loss that turned nadder into adder and numpire into umpire. The first recorded English use of orange as a color: 1502, clothing for Margaret Tudor. Before that: geoluhread, or Chaucer's fox, betwixe yelow and reed.
Even in the 1590s Shakespeare hedged: orange-tawny, in A Midsummer Night's Dream, a writer still unsure the word could stand alone as a hue. Other languages never merged them: Russian apelsin the fruit, oranzhevii the color; Dutch sinaasappel, Chinese apple, the fruit, oranje the color. English simply surrendered, letting a grocery item colonize the spectrum between red and yellow.
The claim: basic color terms arrive in languages roughly by trade usefulness, Berlin and Kay's sequence, and orange proves a hue becomes real to a culture when it becomes merchandise; the rainbow we see is the inventory we stock. Verdict: the sequence model is contested but the orange case is its best witness: the wavelength was always there, the word was waiting for a shipment. Perception follows commerce. Ask the murex snails.
If a color needs an import to be seen, which colors are we still blind to?