mandarin [L16th] Few words can claim such different meanings as a language, a fruit, and a civil servant; but mandarin can. A mandarin was an official in a senior grade of the former imperial Chinese civil service. The word is not Chinese, though, but came into English from Portuguese in the late 16th century, and goes back to a term meaning ‘counsellor, minister’ in Sanskrit. The use of mandarin for a leading civil servant in Britain, as in ‘Whitehall mandarins’, comes from this and dates from the early 20th century. In 1703 Francisco Varo published his Arte de la Lengua Mandarina, the first grammar of any spoken form of Chinese, which described the Chinese used by officials and educated people in general. In 1728 Mandarin first appeared in English for the language, and it is now the name for the standard, official form of Chinese. Mandarin was first applied to a citrus fruit in Swedish. The reason for the name is not certain—it might refer to the colour of Chinese officials’ silk robes, or to the high quality of the delicious little oranges, playing on the old term China *orange. A translation of a Swedish travelogue introduced the mandarin orange to English in 1771.