The avocado is native to Mesoamerica, where it was cultivated for thousands of years before any European had set foot in the region. The English word for it is borrowed from Spanish, and the Spanish word is borrowed from Nahuatl — the language of the Aztecs and still spoken by more than a million people in central Mexico today. The original Nahuatl term was āhuacatl.
A Word with Two Meanings
In Nahuatl, āhuacatl referred both to the fruit and, in slang, to the testicle. The dual meaning was a comparison of shape, and it was no secret — 16th-century Spanish missionaries documented it carefully in their dictionaries of the Aztec language. The fruit's suggestive resemblance to the body part may have given rise to the long-standing folk belief that avocados were an aphrodisiac, a reputation that persisted in Europe well into the 18th century.
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Through Spanish
When Spanish conquistadors encountered the avocado in the early 16th century, they tried to render āhuacatl in Spanish phonetics. The result was aguacate, which is still the standard Spanish word in most of Latin America. But Spanish speakers also produced a near-rhyme that they happened to already know — avocado (later abogado), meaning "lawyer" or "advocate," from the Latin advocatus. The two words got tangled. By the 17th century, even Spanish writers were sometimes calling the fruit avocado, jokingly or by mistake. English borrowed that confused form, and the legal-sounding name has stuck ever since.
Alligator Pears
An English Folk Misreading
For much of the 18th and 19th centuries, English speakers were uncomfortable with both aguacate and avocado. They preferred a folk etymology: "alligator pear." Nobody knows for certain how this came about — the leading theory is that "alligator" was simply an English mishearing of aguacate — but the name was helped along by the fruit's rough, leathery skin. "Alligator pear" persisted in cookbooks and seed catalogues until well into the 20th century.
A Marketing Rebrand
Until the 1910s, the fruit was a niche product in the United States, sold mostly under the name "alligator pear." A group of California growers decided in 1915 that the name was hurting sales — nobody, they reasoned, wanted to eat anything called an alligator. They petitioned to standardise the term to "avocado" and persuaded English-language dictionaries to add the spelling. The rebrand worked: within a generation, "alligator pear" was almost gone.
Other Words from Nahuatl
Several familiar English food words come, like avocado, from Nahuatl by way of Spanish:
- Tomato — from tomatl.
- Chocolate — from chocolātl, originally a bitter cacao drink.
- Chilli (or chili) — from chilli.
- Coyote — from coyotl.
- Mesquite — from mizquitl.
It is a small but important reminder that English does not borrow exclusively from Greek, Latin, French, and Germanic. Some of its most everyday words have travelled thousands of miles — from a marketplace in Tenochtitlan, through a Spanish ship's log, into a 21st-century brunch order.