Avocados growing on Réunion island. Two green avocados hanging from a tree, a third is in the background.
25 April 2022
The avocado (Persea americana) is a fruit native to Central America. The word comes into English via Spanish, which acquired it from the Nahuatl word āhuacatl. The Spanish rendered the word as avocado, an old form of the present-day abogado, meaning advocate or lawyer, almost certainly because the Spanish word approximated the sound of the Nahuatl one. Spanish use of the word dates to the sixteenth century.
Avocado appears in English by 1697, when the plant is described in William Dampier’s A New Voyage Round the World:
The Avogato Pear-tree is as big as most Pear-trees, and is commonly pretty high; the skin or bark black and pretty smooth; the leaves large, of an oval shape, and the Fruit as big as a large Lemon. It is of a green colour, till it is ripe, and then it is a little yellowish. They are seldom fit to eat till they have been gathered 2 or 3 days; then they become soft, and the skin or rind will peel off. The substance in the inside is green, or a little yellowish, and as soft as Butter. Within the substance there is a stone as big as a Horse-plumb. This Fruit hath no taste of its self, and therefore ’tis usually mixt with Sugar and Lime-juice, and beaten together in a Plate, and this is an excellent dish. The ordinary way is to eat it with a little Salt and a rosted Plantain, and thus a man that's hungry, may make a good meal of it. It is very wholsome eaten any way. It is reported that this Fruit provokes to lust, and therefore is said to be much esteemed by the Spaniards; and I do believe they are much esteemed by them, for I have met with plenty of them in many places in the North Seas, where the Spaniards are settled, as in the Bay of Campechy, on the Coast of Cartagena, and the Coast of Carraccos; and there are some in Jamaica, which were planted by the Spaniards, when they possessed that Island.
Guacamole, the dish of avocados mixed with onions, tomatoes, chili peppers, and seasoning, is also from Nahuatl via American Spanish; in this case the Nahuatl word is ahuacamolli, ahuaca[tl] (avocado) + molli (sauce).
It is often claimed, sometimes by reputable dictionaries, that avocado is or comes from the Nahuatl word meaning testicle. This is false but has a germ of truth. The claim first appears in the 1571 Spanish-Nahuatl dictionary by Alonso de Molina, Vocabulario en Lengua Castellana y Mexicana, in which Molina defines the Nahuatl word as follows:
Auacatel. fruta conocida, o el compañon.
(Avocado. known fruit, or the companion.)
Compañon was sixteenth-century Spanish slang for testicle. No other Nahuatl source, past or present, uses āhuacatl in this sense. Frances Karttunen’s 1983 (republished in 1997) An Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl uncritically repeats Molina’s centuries-old definition, and this work would seem to be the source for present-day English-language dictionaries when they repeat the claim. The more common Nahuatl words for testicle are cuitlapanaatetl or atetl, both literally meaning rock or stone.
What we have is a single, sixteenth-century source claiming the word had a secondary sense of testicle. We don’t know how common this slang sense of āhuacatl was, or even if it was only used by the Spanish. If it did have currency, it certainly didn’t survive into the present day, and the primary meaning of the Nahuatl word has always been the fruit.
Why someone would associate avocados with male gonads is rather obvious—they do resemble a human testicle. When Dampier writes the avocado “provokes to lust,” it is obvious that the resemblance is the source of its supposed aphrodisiacal quality. The association of avocados with testicles has always existed, at least among Europeans, but that does not mean the Nahuatl word carries that sense.
Sources:
American Heritage Dictionary, fifth edition, 2011, s.v. avocado, n.
Dampier William. A New Voyage Round the World. London: James Knapton, 1697, 203. Early English Books Online.
Hansen, Magnus Pharao. “No Snopes.com, the Word Guacamole Does Not Come from the Nahuatl Word for ‘ground testicles or avocados.’” Nawatl Scholar, 10 February 2016.
Karttunnen, Frances. An Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl. Austin: U of Texas Press, 1983, s.v. ahuacatl, n.
Molina, Alonso de. Vocabulario en Lengua Castellana y Mexicana. Mexico City: Antonio de Spinosa, 1571, 9r. Internet Archive.
Online Nahuatl Dictionary, 2000–present, s.v. ahuacatl, n., ahuacamolli, n.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. avocado, n., guacamole, n.
Photo credit: Bruno Navez, 2008. Used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.