Let’s start with the delicious brown or sometimes black, sweet and melting bar that we use in desserts or eat it directly from the package that we call chocolate comes from the word cacao bean. Now this is about to get confusing, so make sure to follow along.. The word cacao comes directly from the Spanish Nahuatl word cacahuatl. After Hernán Cortés visited the Aztec king Montezuma II, he went back to Europe and introduced the chocolate but he spelled it as ‘cacao’.
At that time, the word cacao referred specifically to the bean, the pod, the seed and the tree it came from. Nowadays, cacao only refers to the seeds of the cacao plant. Here is where it starts to get confusing: it appears those seeds were also called cocoa beans and since then, those two words have been used to refer to the same thing, causing an eternal confusion on what it is talking about.
Now, the word cocoa by itself can mean two things: one, the cocoa powder that we use for baking and desserts that comes from the roasted cacao beans and the second meaning is the hot beverage that comes from it.
So now you are probably wondering, why did the word ‘chocolate’ get lost in the middle of that confusion? Well, as mentioned initially, the word chocolate comes from the word cacao, but it also comes directly from the Nahuatl root word chocolātl, which according to it’s etymology; chocolate was initially meant to be ‘a beverage made by heating cocoa with milk or water’… in English, that is what we know as cocoa.
Let’s continue with our second word, the tomato. You have probably heard the song that sings about the different pronunciations of the tomato and potato. Let me explain why. In English, around the 1600, the word tomato as we know it today, started off as tomate, which of course comes from the Spanish Nahuatl word tomatl. Before the tomato was introduced, the potato came. So the word that started as tomate, changed to copy the word potato, that’s why it’s written very similarly.
About the pronunciation of these words, in Spanish it was pronounced \tuh-MAH-toh\, but since the pronunciation of potato came earlier in time, the pronunciation of tomato also shifted to \tuh-MAY-toh\. Some people in Great Britain still pronounce the first, some others pronounce the later.
Finally, the word coyote came from Spanish Nahuatl coyōtl to English in the 1700s. This canine is native from North America, and before they used to call them wolves or wild dogs. The coyotes are a different species, they are smaller than wolves, that's why the word stuck around.
Nowadays, the word coyote means something other than just a wild canine. It can be used to talk about an off-putting or cheating person. It has been frequently used to refer to the smugglers that help introduce people illegally to the United States.
Which of these surprised you the most?