Ahuacatl: The Aztec Word Behind Avocado, and Why the Fruit Grows in Pairs
Why are avocados called avocados? The word goes back to ahuacatl, from Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs. And in the Aztec language, ahuacatl meant testicle, most likely because of the fruit’s shape. Sorry. It is just the facts, but we find it funny.
Walk through an avocado grove and you will see why. The fruit often hangs in pairs.
The proof on the branch
We are always keeping an eye out on the grove for a good example, and in this video we found one: two avocados, one branch, hanging side by side. Shape, size, the way they dangle together — you do not need us to spell it out.
It is not every avocado, of course. Plenty grow singly or in bunches. But pairs are common enough that you can see how people who had grown and eaten the fruit for thousands of years landed on the name.
We share this kind of thing because it is part of what makes farming fun. Most people only ever meet an avocado in a mesh bag at the store. Seeing one hanging on the tree, still attached to the stem it grew on, tells you things a grocery display never will, including, occasionally, where a word came from.
Read nextIs Your Grocery Store Hass Avocado Real? Mislabeling in the Produce Aisle
From ahuacatl to avocado
The word traveled a long way to reach an English grocery store. The Spanish apparently could not manage the Aztec word, and ahuacatl became aguacate. That Spanish name first appears in writing in 1550, in the travel journal of the conquistador and historian Pedro de Cieza de León, who found the fruit growing in Panama, Ecuador, Colombia and Peru. Over time English speakers turned it into avocado. The same root is hiding in another word you know: guacamole, from the Nahuatl for avocado sauce.
Along the way the fruit has picked up other names too. It has been called an alligator pear for its rough green skin and pear shape, a nickname that still turns up now and then.
California growers could not stand it. When the California Ahuacate Association formed in Los Angeles in 1915, the members debated and settled on “avocado” as the official name. They told dictionary publishers the plural was avocados, not avocadoes, and agreed that any member caught using “alligator pear”, then common in Florida, should be severely reprimanded. The group later became the California Avocado Society.
The first written accounts
Europeans first wrote about the avocado in 1519, in Martin Fernandez de Enciso’s Suma de Geographia, which describes the fruit growing near what is now Santa Marta, Colombia. A fuller account by Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo followed in 1526. He described fruit weighing a pound or more with flesh like butter, and noted that it was picked before it was ripe and ripened in storage. That part has not changed: we still pick avocados hard and let them soften on the counter.
The fruit got around. George Washington wrote in 1751 that he had tasted “agovago pears” in Barbados, and in the 1700s European sailors spread avocado on their hardtack and called it midshipman’s butter.
A fruit with a long history
The avocado is native to southern Mexico, Central America and the West Indies, and people there ate it for a very long time before it reached California. The California chapter is much younger: the first plantings were probably around 1850, and three seedlings Judge R. B. Ord planted in Santa Barbara in 1871 are generally considered the foundation of the state’s avocado industry. Some of it happened right here — the first avocado tree in San Diego County was planted in Escondido. The fruit in almost every grocery store today traces back to a single tree, as we tell in the story of Hass patent 139. There is more on the bigger story in our California avocado history.
Whatever you call it, it is still best mashed with a little lime and salt. Becca’s classic guacamole is a good place to start, and our 4lb Hass box and 6lb Hass box ship free in season, with a waitlist on each page between harvests. Until the trees are picking again, the avocado scoop, the Hawaiian shirt and our hats ship year-round.
Try this: Next time you walk past an avocado tree, look for fruit hanging in pairs. Once you have seen it you cannot unsee it.
This post is part of our guide to the history of California avocados.
