(Colour) orange-pink.
Like Mozart, Edison, or Keats, apricots are precocious. The ancient Romans called this fruit malum praecoquum—malum meaning fruit and the Latin praecoquum literally meaning precooked but metaphorically meaning early ripened. Apricots and geniuses are therefore praecoquum—or in English precocious— because they ripen before their peers. In the first century, Greeks took part of this Latin name, praecoquum, and adopted it as praikokion; by the sixth century this name had changed in Byzantine Greek to berikokkion, which Arabic then borrowed as al birquq, the al being the Arabic definite article meaning the. Finally, this Arabic name was borrowed by the Spanish as albaricoque, which entered English in the mid sixteenth century as abrecock before being respelt as apricot. The original Latin praecoquum, incidentally, derives from coquere, meaning to cook, the source not only of apricot and precocious, but also of the words kitchen, cuisine, culinary, and cook.
Apricots are a type of fruit that are grown on prunus trees and are native to China. In modern times, apricots are widely cultivated in warmer temperate countries across the globe, including southern California, Spain, South Africa, and Australia. These fruits are commonly sold in fresh, canned, and dried form, and possess a distinctively sweet and tangy flavor profile. Whether consumed on their own as a healthy snack or incorporated into a variety of culinary preparations, apricots remain a beloved and versatile fruit.