alt Hacker NewsWait, do people in the US really call them "orange cats" - I just thought that was a reddit / internet thing.
In the UK these are ginger cats.
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We call them orange cats (gatos laranjas) in Portuguese too!
I thought it was popularized by internet/Reddit as a joke denoting that ginger cats are "special": https://www.reddit.com/r/OneOrangeBraincell/
Many places outside the US call them orange as well.
Cookie vs biscuit, vacation vs holiday, gasoline vs petrol, etc, etc.
I always found this funny as well. We say ginger cats (chats roux) in French too!
I'm an ex Brit, living in the US, and have an orange tabby that I like to say is orange, but his name is "Gingey".
Does that help? :)
You might be shocked that we say "red heads" instead of ginger as well.
In the US, "ginger" is a seasoning, not a color. Like, in general; we do not refer to anything as being ginger-colored unless it's a sort of pale yellowish tan.
We use both terms here. Ginger has become more popular recently, probably due to UK Internet influence over recent years.
Hey now, that's prejudice!
I always called the orange even when I was in the UK.
In Australia they're known an ranga cats (ranga as in orangutan).
I'm in the US, but through cultural osmosis, ginger in the UK context is in my vocabulary. I think things like this are going to coalesce, slowly.
UK and USA are brotherly nations divided only by their common language.
in italian we call them "red cats"
They are mostly tabbies at the end of the day. But colloquially, yes: the US tends to simply call them orange.
Yes. But we also call redheads "redheads" as a rule, not "gingers" - except that the "ginger" thing has filtered over here via the Internet in the past, I dunno, 20 years.
Like, I can't recall anybody describing a redheaded person as a "ginger" in the 80s or 90s, (location: Missouri) it's something I've only encountered since there's been more language cross-pollination due to the Internet.