Orange Trivia
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98 free Orange trivia questions with answers — food & drink quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This orange trivia quiz starts with the fruit (a hybrid of mandarin and pomelo first mentioned in Chinese writing in 314 BC), moves to the colour that took its name from it, and then follows the word wherever it went: the House of Orange and the Dutch national colour, the Roman city in Provence, the Orange Free State and Orange River, Agent Orange, the Orange Bowl and A Clockwork Orange. Along the way you will find out where the navel orange was born, why Louis XIV confiscated a thousand trees, how the letter n fell off the front of the word, why Dutch carrots are orange, what makes a blood orange bleed, and which mineral gave ancient painters their orange before the fruit had reached Europe. Easy questions sit beside genuinely hard ones so a family or a pub team can play the same set. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the fruit, the colour and the related people and places, and each question quotes the sentence that supports it.
30 of 98 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Botanically, the sweet orange is a hybrid between the mandarin and which other citrus fruit?
Pomelo
Genome analysis puts it at roughly 42% pomelo and 58% mandarin; the grapefruit in turn arose from a sweet orange crossed back with pomelo.
Q 02The earliest known mention of the sweet orange, from 314 BC, appears in the literature of which country?
China
The fruit was domesticated in a region spanning southern China, northeast India and Myanmar; it does not exist in the wild.
Q 03Which country produced the most oranges in 2024, about 23% of the world total?
Brazil
Brazil squeezes much of its crop instead of selling it as fruit: as of 2025 its factories made most of the world's orange juice, and no country exported more of it.
Q 04Oranges sit on a chest and windowsill in which famous Jan van Eyck painting?
The Arnolfini Portrait
In the Arnolfini Portrait, oranges rest on the chest and windowsill beside the couple, a sign of wealth in 1434 Bruges; Botticelli later set his Primavera in an orange grove.
Q 05Louis XIV seized more than 1,000 orange trees from which disgraced finance minister's estate in 1664?
Nicolas Fouquet
Nicolas Fouquet lost everything at Vaux-le-Vicomte when the king had him convicted; the trees were moved to the Orangerie at Versailles, built the year before.
Q 06Which explorer may have planted the first oranges in the Americas, on Hispaniola in 1493?
Christopher Columbus
Christopher Columbus is thought to have planted the first orange trees in the Americas on Hispaniola in 1493, during his second voyage; later Spanish expeditions carried the fruit on to the mainland.
Q 07Eliza Tibbets's two trees, planted in Riverside in 1873, launched California's citrus industry with which seedless orange?
Navel
Navel oranges began as a single mutation at a monastery in Bahia; having no seeds, every tree since has been grown from a cutting, including the pair sent to Tibbets from Washington.
Q 08The word 'orange' is traced through Sanskrit to which older language family?
Dravidian
Dravidian languages of southern India, such as Tamil, are thought to have given Sanskrit its word for the tree; the name then travelled west with the fruit itself.
Q 09Passing from Arabic into Italian and French, the word 'orange' dropped which first letter?
Letter N
Letter N is still there in Spanish naranja; elsewhere it was probably swallowed by the article in front of it, the same slip that turned English 'a napron' into 'an apron'.
Q 10An early recorded English use of 'orange' as a colour, in 1502, described what?
Clothing bought for Margaret Tudor
Clothing bought for Margaret Tudor, daughter of Henry VII, is what the 1502 record lists; a year later she married James IV of Scotland, the match that eventually united the two crowns.
Q 11Before the fruit gave the colour its English name, what was the colour usually called?
Yellow-red
Old English speakers called the colour yellow-red, ġeolurēad, and used ġeolucrog, 'yellow-saffron', for the yellower shades; 'orange' became an English colour word only in the early 1500s.
Q 12Human eyes see orange when light has a dominant wavelength in roughly which range?
585–620 nanometres
585–620 nanometres is the band of pure orange light; Isaac Newton showed with a prism that it cannot be split, unlike an orange mixed from red and yellow light.
Q 13The orange colour of carrots, pumpkins and oranges comes from which pigments?
Carotenes
Q 21The 2004 'Orange Revolution' carried reformer Viktor Yushchenko to the presidency of which country?
Ukraine
Ukraine's Orange Revolution, weeks of protests in Kyiv in November–December 2004 over a rigged run-off, forced a re-vote that Viktor Yushchenko won.
Q 22In the nursery rhyme, the bells of which London church say 'Oranges and lemons'?
St Clement's
St Clement's opens the rhyme; St Clement Danes in London still plays the tune on its bells every day, though a second City church, St Clement's in Eastcheap, is also linked with the line.
Q 23Which cocktail mixes tequila, lime juice and an orange liqueur such as triple sec?
Margarita
Margarita is Spanish for daisy, and cocktail historians link the drink to the Daisy, an older family of cocktails built on a spirit, citrus juice and a liqueur.
Carotenes take their name from the carrot, carota in Latin; the same pigments turn autumn leaves orange once the green chlorophyll breaks down.
Q 14Which famous structure is painted 'international orange' to make it more visible in fog?
Golden Gate Bridge
The Golden Gate Bridge owes its 'international orange' to architect Irving Morrow, who chose it himself; the US Navy had wanted black and yellow stripes so that passing ships could see it.
Q 15Orange is the national colour of which country?
Netherlands
Orange is the Dutch national colour, taken from the royal House of Orange-Nassau; the heir apparent to the Netherlands' throne bears the title Prince or Princess of Orange.
Q 16The House of Orange takes its name from a tiny principality just north of which French city?
Avignon
The Principality of Orange, about 108 square miles around the town of Orange just north of Avignon, passed to William the Silent in 1544, giving the House of Orange-Nassau its name.
Q 17The town of Orange in Provence has one of the best-preserved Roman buildings of which kind?
Theatre
Theatre: its stage wall still stands to its full 37 metres and was built to project sound, which is why the building works today as the home of a summer opera festival.
Q 18Which soft-drink brand, famous for its orange flavour, did Coca-Cola's German arm create in 1940?
Fanta
Fanta was created in 1940 by Max Keith of Coca-Cola Deutschland when a wartime embargo cut off Coke syrup; the orange recipe sold today was developed in Italy in 1955.
Q 19The Orange Order's marches every 12 July commemorate which battle of 1690?
The Boyne
The Battle of the Boyne was where the Protestant William of Orange beat the Catholic James II; Ulster Protestants founded the Order in his name in County Armagh a century later, in 1795.
Q 20The Orange River, South Africa's longest, rises in the Drakensberg mountains of which country?
Lesotho
Lesotho's highlands are where the Orange rises before running west to the Atlantic; the explorer Robert Jacob Gordon named it after the House of Orange, not after any colour.
Q 24The Orange Bowl college football game has been played every year since 1935 in which metropolitan area?
Miami
Miami organised the game's forerunner, the Palm Festival, in 1932 to help a city hit by the Depression and a land bust; it took the Orange Bowl name on New Year's Day 1935.
Q 25Agent Orange belonged to a group of Vietnam War defoliants known collectively as what?
Rainbow Herbicides
Agent Orange was one of the 'Rainbow Herbicides', each named for the colour marked on its storage drums (Pink, Purple, White and Green among them) and sprayed under Operation Ranch Hand from 1962 to 1971.
Q 26The crimson flesh of a blood orange comes from which pigments, unusual in citrus?
Anthocyanins
Anthocyanins, the pigments of red grapes and berries but rare in citrus, colour blood-orange flesh; the red develops only when the fruit grows through cold nights and deepens in cold storage.
Q 27British marmalade is traditionally made from which bitter orange, nearly all of which Spain exports to Britain?
Seville
Seville oranges, bitter and rich in pectin, set a firm marmalade; Spain's Seville crop is too sour for eating and much of it is shipped to Britain for preserving.
Q 28Which Dundee woman is credited with first adding pieces of peel to marmalade in the 1790s?
Janet Keiller
Janet Keiller of Dundee is credited with adding the strips of peel in 1797; in the local legend her family had bought a Spanish ship's cargo of bitter oranges on speculation, and she turned it into preserve.
Q 29The dried peel of the laraha, a bitter-orange subspecies, is used to flavour which liqueur?
Curaçao
Curaçao liqueur uses only the dried peel because nothing else of the laraha is edible: it descends from orange trees brought from Spain in 1527, which fared so badly in the arid soil that they were abandoned.
Q 30Most of the world's bergamot orange, prized for its aromatic oil, is grown in which Italian region?
Calabria
Calabria grows it along the Ionian coast around Reggio, where the fruit is a symbol of the city; the oil pressed from its peel is what gives Earl Grey tea its flavour.