The etymology of "guacamole"
Where do the words “avocado” and “guacamole” come from?
When the Spanish began their conquest of Mesoamerica in 1519, the dominant language in the region near modern-day Mexico City was Aztec—or as it’s called in the language itself, Nahuatl (pronounced in English as /ˈnɑ.wɑ.təl/ and in the language itself as /ˈnaː.wat͡ɬ/). The -tl at the end of that word is a suffix added to the ends of stems to create nouns. The root of the word is nāhua- ‘audible, intelligible, clear’. So nāhuatl literally means ‘speaking intelligibly’, referring to the Nahuatl language. The variety of Nahuatl spoken at the time of Spanish conquest is known as Classical Nahuatl. There are still about 1.7 million Nahuas who speak the language today, although the language has changed significantly over the last 500 years and has started to diverge into distinct languages.
Now, the root meaning ‘avocado’ in Nahuatl is āhuaca-, and the suffixed version of that root is āhuacatl. The Spanish borrowed this word as aguacate, a folk etymology based on parsing the first part of āhuacatl as the Spanish word agua ‘water’. aguacate remains the word for ‘avocado’ for many Spanish speakers today.
