After being alerted to Google’s ‘Ngram viewer‘, I thought I’d use it to track ‘orange’, recently described as the only common English word with no homonyms (doubtless nonsense, tho’ the nearest I can get is ‘syringe’ – definitely close but no cigar). The result was fascinating:

What a weird graph! Could the peak around 1650 be something to do with Nell Gwynne? She was supposed to be a big citrus fan, wasn’t she? And why the calamitous fall from those heady days back to near-zero 50 years later, only to recover its 1650s popularity in the early years of the 21st century? The mystery of Orange…

The ngram viewer is a wonderful tool, BTW, albeit one that comes with significant caveats, as witness this article in Wired.