Etymology
Where does the word "chocolate" come from?
Chocolate
The word "chocolate" entered the English language from Spanish. How the word came into Spanish is less certain, and there are competing explanations. Perhaps the most cited explanation is that "chocolate" comes from Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, from the word "chocolātl", which many sources derived from "xocolātl" , from "xococ" 'sour' or 'bitter', and "ātl" 'water' or 'drink'. However, as William Bright noted, the word "chocolatl" does not occur in central Mexican colonial sources, making this an unlikely derivation. Santamaria gives a derivation from the Yucatec Maya word "chokol" meaning 'hot', and the Nahuatl "atl" meaning 'water'. Sophie and Michael D. Coe agree with this etymology. Pointing to various sources dating from the time of the Spanish conquest, they identify "cacahuatl" ("cacao water") as the original Nahuatl word for the cold beverage consumed by the Aztecs. Noting that using a word with "caca" in it to describe a thick brown beverage would not have gone over well with most speakers of Spanish because "caca" means 'faeces' in Spanish, the Coes suggest that the Spanish colonisers combined the Nahuatl "atl" with the Yucatec Maya "chocol", for, unlike the Aztec, the Maya tended to drink chocolate heated. The Spanish preferred the warm Mayan preparation of the beverage to the cold Aztec one, and so the colonisers substituted "chocol" in place of the culturally unacceptable "caca". More recently, Dakin and Wichmann derive it from another Nahuatl term, "chicolatl" from eastern Nahuatl, meaning "beaten drink". They derive this term from the word for the frothing stick, "chicoli". However, the Coes write that "xicalli" referred to the gourd out of which the beverage was consumed and that the use of a frothing stick (known as a "molinillo") was a product of creolisation between the Spanish and Aztec; the original frothing method used by the indigenous people was simply pouring the drink from a height into another vessel.