Back to Blog
Coyote pronunciation5/15/2023 ![]() ![]() The word tomato started out as tomate in English around 1600, from the Spanish word that came from the Nahuatl tomatl. In fact, the definition of tomato lists the part that we eat as a “berry,” which may come as a surprise. People who love red-sauce Italian food might be surprised to learn that the tomato is a New World fruit. (Interestingly, the variation cocoa was possibly influenced by another then-newly named tropical plant: the coconut.) Cocoa stands on its own to mean both the brown powder made from roasted cacao beans and the hot drink that is made from it.Ĭhocolate also came to English through Spanish, but has a different Nahuatl root word: chocolātl, from the combined words chikolli meaning “hook,” probably referring to the beater used to mix chocolate with water, and ātl, meaning “water” or “liquid.” As this etymology makes clear, chocolate originally meant “a beverage made by heating cocoa with water or milk,” that is, what we today call cocoa.Īs if these overlapping terms weren’t confusing enough, Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged dictionary also offers an entry for chocolate tree, whose definition is: “cacao.” The word cocoa was at first just a variant (and therefore a synonym) that first appeared about a century after cacao, and the two words have been used interchangeably to refer to the seeds, beans, and tree ever since. Those seeds are also called, somewhat confusingly, cocoa beans. Today it usually refers to the dried seeds of the cacao plant. Cacao initially referred to parts of the plant: the seed, the pod, the bean, and the tree itself. Cacao was the spelling used by the conquistador Hernán Cortés, who introduced chocolate to Europe in 1519 following his visit to the court of the Aztec king Montezuma II, where he was served a bitter cacao-bean drink. Unsurprisingly, cacao is the oldest of these words in English-it’s a direct borrowing of the Spanish spelling used for the Nahuatl word cacahuatl. Chocolate comes from the cacao bean, as does cocoa, and because the three words sometimes overlap, their precise meanings can be confusing.
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |