Formal theory-driven, psycholinguistic data and corpus-driven study confirms the absence of a basic colour term for ORANGE in Modern Standard Mandarin and elaborates the syntaxico-semantic distributional potential criterion for basicness

The orange portion of the spectrum had been thoroughly differentiated in Chinese cultural tradition. In Old and Classical Chinese, orange shades were expressed by the contextually restricted terms 騂 xīng and 緹 tí, applied to mammal hair and silk fabric respectively. This paper deploys different kinds of evidence to demonstrate that there is no monomorphemic monosyllabic colour term for encoding ORANGE in Modern Standard Mandarin, and the possible candidates do not possess the entire set of the criteria for basicness established by Berlin and Kay and enriched by other scholars.