Cacao, Cocoa, Chocolate

Goal: After this lesson you can trace the words for chocolate and explain what the trail reveals. Subject: English Language Arts | Run time: about 6 minutes

Quick recall

Last time we asked the fifty-cent question. Two quick checks. One: what does a cacao farmer in Cote d'Ivoire often earn in a day? Somewhere around 50 to 84 cents (Coe & Coe, 2013). Two: about how much would the price of a chocolate bar need to rise to fund a living wage for those farmers? About 15 percent (Coe & Coe, 2013).

Why this matters

You have three words for one plant. Cacao. Cocoa. Chocolate. They sound like cousins, and they are, but the way they grew apart is a small history of who held the bean and who took it. Follow the words and you follow the power.

The idea

Start at the source. The plant and its raw bean come from a Nahuatl word, cacahuatl (kah-kah-WAH-tul). Nahuatl is the Aztec language. So the name for the tree and the seed is indigenous, and it sits at the very beginning of the trail (Coe & Coe, 2013). The drink has its own Nahuatl word, xocolatl (shoh-KOH-lah-tul), which means bitter water (Coe & Coe, 2013). That is where chocolate comes from. The thing you think of as sweet is named, at its root, for a bitter drink. Now watch the word bend. Cacahuatl became cacao in Spanish, close to the original. Then English took cacao and produced cocoa (Coe & Coe, 2013). Cocoa is a corruption, an English misspelling, likely born on a shipping document where a clerk got the letters wrong and the wrong version stuck (Coe & Coe, 2013). So the industrial, on-the-label word is, at heart, a mistake that traveled by ship. There is one more word, and it comes from a different language entirely. When European botanists named the species, they reached for Greek. Theobroma is theos plus broma, food of the gods (Coe & Coe, 2013). The Maya and the Aztec treated cacao as sacred, and the scientific name, in a borrowed European tongue, agreed with them. Here is the point. Line the words up in order. Cacahuatl, the indigenous root. Cacao, the Spanish version. Cocoa, the English misspelling on the shipping papers. That trail, from a precise indigenous word to a colonial misspelling, mirrors the larger path the bean itself took, from indigenous control to European appropriation (Coe & Coe, 2013). The language carries the history.

Picture it

Picture the word on a journey. It starts in an Aztec market as cacahuatl, spoken plainly. It crosses to Spanish hands and becomes cacao. It rides a ship north, lands on an English dock as a smudged entry in a ledger, and walks off as cocoa. And somewhere in a naming book, a botanist writes Theobroma over all of it, food of the gods, in Greek, as if to bless what was taken.

Remember this

The fact to carry out: cacao and chocolate both come from Nahuatl, the Aztec language, where cacahuatl is the bean and xocolatl is bitter water, while cocoa is an English corruption of cacao, and the word trail from cacahuatl to cacao to cocoa mirrors the path from indigenous control to European appropriation (Coe & Coe, 2013). Words remember where things came from, even when the label forgets.

Quick check

Quick check. What does xocolatl mean, and what kind of word is cocoa? Xocolatl means bitter water, and cocoa is an English corruption of cacao, likely a shipping-document misspelling (Coe & Coe, 2013).

Key Takeaways

Cacao comes from the Nahuatl cacahuatl (kah-kah-WAH-tul), the word for the raw bean and the tree (Coe & Coe, 2013).
Chocolate comes from the Nahuatl xocolatl (shoh-KOH-lah-tul), meaning bitter water (Coe & Coe, 2013).
Cocoa is an English corruption of cacao, likely a shipping-document misspelling (Coe & Coe, 2013).
Theobroma is Greek, theos plus broma, food of the gods, and the trail from cacahuatl to cacao to cocoa mirrors the move from indigenous control to European appropriation (Coe & Coe, 2013).

Sources

Coe, S. D., & Coe, M. D. (2013). The true history of chocolate (3rd ed.). Thames and Hudson.