What does Mandarin mean?

It is also a citrus fruit which looks like this:



I have a mandarin tree in my backyard.

A mandarin. One of the class of people who were the administrators of the Chinese government for a thousand years or so, until the Chinese Revolution overthrew the emperor in the early part of the 20th century, a self-perpetuating ruling class chosen by high performance in rigorous exams in the Chinese classics. Mandarin was the standardized language they spoke, no matter what Chinese dialect might have been their tongue by birth. Nice threads