by Kevin Burton
If you have an appetite for words and/or dinner and dessert, you’re in the right place.
One of the recent Words at Play columns from Merriam-Webster featured words from the Aztecs, who lived in central Mexico at the time of the Spanish conquest.
The language they spoke (and about a million people still speak) is called Nahuatl. Many of their words have been incorporated into English. As you’ll see below, most of them leave a good taste in your mouth:
Chocolate
The words chocolate, cacao, and cocoa all come ultimately from Nahuatl. Cacao is the oldest of these words in English—it’s a direct borrowing of the Spanish spelling used for the Nahuatl word cacahuatl. 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.
Cacao initially referred to parts of the plant: the seed, the pod, the bean, and the tree itself. Today it usually refers to the dried seeds of the cacao plant.
Those seeds are also called, somewhat confusingly, cocoa beans. 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.
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.
Chocolate 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.
Coyote
The word coyote came to English through Mexican Spanish from the Nahuatl word coyōtl in the mid-1700s. Prior to that time, many Europeans simply called the native North American canines wolves, which wasn’t true to fact then but has become more so. While western coyotes are a distinct species and smaller than wolves, they hybridized with wolves as they moved east, likely in the Great Lakes region in the 1930s and 40s. Recent studies have shown that eastern coyotes are hybrids of coyotes, wolves, and domestic dogs.
Axolotl
This salamander is distinctive because it retains external gills and a fin on its back into adulthood—traits that seem more like those of an adult fish than an amphibian—and because it has such small legs and feet, it looks like a walking fish. Today it is an endangered species, but it was often eaten as a delicacy in Mexico going back to Aztec times.
The word axolotl comes straight from the Aztec Nahuatl name for the animal, and is one of the words that have retained the interesting tl cluster (as does Nahuatl itself) so distinctive to that language.
Avocado
The English word avocado is a transliteration first used in the late 1600s of the Spanish word aguacate, which came from the Nahuatl name for the indigenous fruit, āhuacatl. A corruption of aguacate led to another term for the fruit, alligator pear, and because of the shape of the fruit, avocado pear is a term used in British English.
One of the most popular ways to prepare avocado is guacamole, the mashed mixture with tomatoes and onion. Guacamole also has roots in the Nahuatl word āhuacatl, blended with the Mexican Spanish word for “sauce,” mole (pronounced \MOH-lay\), which itself comes from the Nahuatl word for “sauce,” mōlli.
The shape of avocados wasn’t compared only to pears: the original Nahuatl word also means “testicle.” There is no guacamole equivalent for this meaning, perhaps thankfully.
If you didn’t just lose your appetite after that latter reference, come back next Friday for a second helping of words from Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs.
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