Eng. chili (pepper) and Sp. chile/pimiento/ají
The English word chili [ˈʧɪ.li] (chilli in British English) and its Spanish cognate chile [ˈʧi.le]come from Nahuatl chīlli [ˈʧi.li]. These words refer to the fruit of several species of plants from the Capsicum genus, from the nightshade family (Solanaceae). This name is unrelated to the name of the country of Chile, a name that the Spanish borrowed from the Incas and whose origin is unknown, although theories abound about where the country name might have come from.
In some dialects of English, the word pepper is omitted from the name and in others it is not. Chili peppers originated in the Americas, namely in Mexico, Central America, and the northern part of South America. From there, Europeans took them to Asia and Europe, where they became very popular. Chilies were among the fastest American plants to be adopted by Europeans, both for cooking and for curing meats. Other popular imports from the Americas that did not exist in Europe before 1492 were, of course, tomatoes, potatoes, beans, maize (corn), sunflowers, squash, and peanuts.
Figure 170: Three types of chilies: Green bird’s eye, yellow Madame Jeanette, and red Cayenne peppers[i]
Capsicum is the
name given to the chili’s taxonomic genus, which is part of the Solanaceae or nightshades
family of flowering plants (Sp.
solanáceas).
The word
Capsicum is a New Latin
creation derived from Lat.
capsa ‘box’,
meaning something like ‘box-like’ or ‘boxy’, presumably after the plants’
shape. (Lat.
capsa is the source of
patrimonial Spanish
caja ‘box’.) Chilies
hybridize easily and thus, there are many varieties for each species. Also,
some varieties can go by different names in different locations. For example,
the very hot
chili pequin goes by
different names in different countries and regions in Mexico and Central
America:
chile piquín,
chile amashito,
chile pequín,
chile petín,
chiltepe
(Guatemala),
chile congo (Nicaragua and
northern Costa Rica),
chile de monte
or
del monte,
chile mosquito, among others.
[i]
There are four main species of the Capsicum genus,
each of which comes in many different varieties or cultivars. The main species is
Capsicum annuum, the most
common and widespread species. It includes
many varieties of different shapes and sizes, hot and mild. It includes the
classical bell pepper, which is not
typically considered a chili in English (Sp.
pimiento, ají morrón, chile morrón,
chile dulce, chiltoma, pimiento morrón,
pimentón).
The Capsicum annum
species also includes a number of popular chilis, many of which, but not all,
are hot (pungent) to some degree or other: cayenne
(pepper) (Sp. (pimienta de) cayena),
jalapeños (Sp. chile jalapeño, though when dried and smoked is known as chile chipotle, from Nahuatl chilpoctli ‘smoked chili’), pequin (Sp. piquín, etc.), serrano
pepper (Sp. chile serrano or chile verde), mirasol chili (Sp. chile
mirasol, though when dried it is known as chile guajillo), pasilla
chili (wrinkled like a raisin, Sp. pasa;
Sp. chile pasilla or chile negro), poblano or ancho
(Mexico’s favorite pepper, from Puebla; Sp. chile
poblano or (chile) ancho, when
ripened to red and dried).
These chilies can be eaten fresh, added to food in cooking,
or made into sauces. In powder form, these are the source of popular spices,
such as cayenne, chili, and paprika powders (see §47.3.8
below). The annuum part of the
species name is Latin for ‘of the years’ since it is the genitive plural of the word annus ‘year’ (source of Sp. año
‘year’); the name is a misnomer, since this is not an annual plant; in the
absence of frost, it can grow to be a large shrubby perennial.
The second common
species of chile is
Capsicum
frutescens. Fruits from this species do not typically have
chili in the English name, but rather
pepper. It includes the varieties
malagueta pepper, which is very common
in Brazil and all Portuguese-speaking countries,
tabasco pepper (from the Mexican state of Tabasco; Sp.
chile tabasco)
,
bird’s eye chili (or
cabai rawit;
from Ethiopia and Southeast Asia), and
piri
piri (from southeastern Africa, derived from malagueta). It is interesting
that some do not consider Capsicum frutescens to be a separate species from
Capsicum annuum. By the way, the
frutescens part of the species name is a
New Latin word that means ‘shrub-like’. This word comes from the present
participle of a non-existing verb *
frutēscĕre
derived from Lat.
frŭtex
‘shrub, bush’ (genitive:
frŭtĭcis).
These plants can be annual or short-lived perennials. Finally, varieties of
this species are not as different from each other as those of
Capsicum annuum.
Capsicum chinense
is the third main species of the Capsicum genus, which is less varied. This
type of chili is also known as bonnet
pepper because of its shape. The hottest peppers are from this species,
such as the habanero, which is the
most common variety (Sp. chile habanero,
named after La Habana, the capital of Cuba, though it is typical of different
Mexican regions, such as Campeche, Quintana Roo, and Yucatan). Two other chilis
from this family cultivated in both Mexico and Peru are ají panca y ají limo
(same names in English as in Spanish). Other names for the same or similar
members of this species are chile congo,
chocolate, chile porrón, ají chombo,
and bondamanjak (in Reunion). The
word chinense in the name meaning
‘Chinese’ and it is the nominative neuter singular form of the New Latin
adjective chinēnsis ‘Chinese’, a word
that did not exist in Classical Latin. This name is also a misnomer since the
pepper originated in the Americas, not in China, as the person who named the
species in 1776 thought. It is actually native to Central America, the Yucatan
region, and the Caribbean islands.
The species
Capsicum pubescens is originally
from the Peru region, though it is now grown in the whole Andean region and even
further north, all the way to Mexico. This species includes the famous South
American
rocoto peppers (Sp.
rocoto) of Peru,
Ecuador, Bolivia and Argentina, known in Mexico as
chile de cera or
chile
manzano, because of its surface and its shape, respectively. Other Spanish
names are
morrongo,
perón, and
ciruelo (from Sp.
ciruela
‘plum’). The word
pubescens in the
species name was meant to mean ‘hairy’, due to the plant’s hairy leaves. This
word comes from Lat.
pūbēscēns,
present participle of the verb
pūbēscĕre
‘to ripen, mature’, ‘to reach puberty, become pubescent’ and, derived from it ‘grow
body hair’.
Finally, the
species Capsicum baccatum is originally
from the Andes region, where the chili peppers are known as ají in Spanish, a word that comes from
Taino and was first documented in 1493 in what is now Haiti. Varieties of this
chili tend to be very hot. It includes among its varieties (cultivars) the South
American aji peppers, in particular ají amarillo, ají limón
(Eng. lemon drop),
and criolla sella, among others. The variety pendulum is the most common one in Chile, Bolivia, Peru and
Ecuador. It is commonly made into a sauce, known just as ají or ají sauce (Sp. ají, salsa
de ají). As for the word baccatum
of the species name, it seems to be the neuter form of the adjective baccatus that means ‘producing or
bearing berries’ and ‘berry-like or pulpy’, since it is derived from bacca ‘berry, fruit; pearl’ (= bāca).
In English, the names chili and pepper can be applied to the many plant species of the Capsicum genus, each of which may have quite different varieties or cultivars (see below). The actual use of the word chili varies quite a bit from one place to another in the English-speaking world and the use of one over the other may depend also on context and personal experience and this word competes with, or sometimes combines with, the word pepper, as in chili pepper. Remember, however, that the word pepper in English refers to two very different things: the condiment usually known as black pepper and the various types of fruits of the Capsicum genus, sweet bell peppers and chilies, some of which are hot and some of which are not. (Black pepper, known as pimiento in Spanish, will be discussed in §47.3.22 below.)
In Spanish too, or at least in some dialects of Spanish, the name for these two very different things is almost the same, pimienta in the case of black pepper and pimiento for chili peppers. The reason for this is that when the Spanish first found pungent chilies in the Americas which could be used as the basis for condiments, they named the plants after their name for black pepper, namely pimienta. This, by the way, was one of the major spices that Columbus was after when he set off for the Indies, where black pepper originated. In Spain, to this day, the generic name for chilies is pimiento, which is very similar to the name for black pepper, namely pimienta. In Spanish America, the words chile and ají predominate, depending on the country or region.
The Spanish word pimienta ‘black pepper’ is not derived from the Latin word for black pepper, which was piper, the source of Eng. pepper, as we shall see. Rather, it comes from Latin pĭgmĕnta, which was a generic name for condiments. In Spanish, however, it came to refer just to black pepper, the second most common condiment, after salt. Lat. pĭgmĕnta was not a feminine word but rather the plural of pĭgmĕntum, a neuter second-declension noun that meant primarily ‘coloring (matter), dye, pigment, tint, paint’, which in Latin also came to have the sense of ‘drug, ingredient’ and, later on, as we said, ‘condiment’ when used in the plural. English pigment and its Spanish cognate pigmento are learned words (loanwords) derived from the very same Latin source. In other words, Sp. pigmento is a learned doublet of Sp. pimiento, the word for ‘chili pepper’ in Spain.
Lat.
pĭgmĕntum is derived from the third conjugation verb
pingĕre ‘to color, paint’ and the noun-forming suffix ‑
ment‑(um) (
ping‑+‑ment‑+‑um). (The principal parts of the verb
pingĕre were present
pingo, present infinitive
pingĕre, perfect active
pinxī, supine
pictum.) The verbs Eng.
to paint and its Spanish cognate
pintar come ultimately from a Vulgar Latin *
pinctāre, a modification of Lat. *
pictāre, the frequentative version of Lat.
pingĕre formed with the Vulgar Latin version *
pinct‑ of the supine stem
pict‑.
Other words were derived from the supine stem
pict‑, from which we get words such as Eng.
picture (Sp.
pintura) and
picturesque (Sp.
pintoresco).
Eng. pepper [ˈpɛ.pəɹ] a very early borrowing into Germanic from Latin, from the period before Old English, when all Germanic peoples lived on the continent and were neighbors of the Roman Empire. The Romans got the word pĭper (genitive wordform: pĭpĕris) from Ancient Greek πέπερι (péperi), a word which was also a loanword, from an Indo-Arian source, cf. Sanskrit पिप्पलि (pippali) ‘long pepper’. This word pepper, of course, referred originally only to peppercorns, used whole or ground into powder, not to the chilies, which, as we just saw, were named in English by condiment analogy after the Spanish brought them back to Europe from the Americas. In many varieties of English, the word pepper is now used for both bell peppers and chilies as well as for black pepper. There are many regional peculiarities, however, as to what these different plants are called. Thus, for example, in parts of the American Midwest, bell peppers are called mangoes. Using the same word pepper for two such different things is, no doubt, a result of calquing what the Spanish did with pimienta/pimiento, though Spanish at least changed the inflectional ending and gender.
By the way, the word pimiento, or pimento, exists in English and it is a borrowing from Spanish (and/or Portuguese). It is an alternate name for cherry peppers, which are a variety of large, red, heart-shaped chili pepper, from the same family (Capsicum annuum). Sweet pimiento peppers are the stuffing of what in the US is known as stuffed Spanish green olives. Actually, over the years and in different places, the word pimento has also been used in English for allspice and the allspice tree, among other things.
In the Spanish-speaking Americas, however, members of the Capsicum genus are not called pimientos, like in Spain. They go by different names, depending on the region. One of them is chile, as we have seen, from Nahuatl chīlli, which is used in Mexico and Central America. In Nicaragua, the word chiltoma is used for any type of sweet pepper, green or red. The exact source of this word is not known, though it may be a blend of Nahuatl chīlli ‘chili, pepper’ and tomatl ‘tomatillo’ (the source of Eng. tomato and Sp. tomate).
In the Caribbean, the more common word is ají, from the Taino word haxí, though in Cuba, for instance, chile is also used for a variety of chili. In the Andean region, ají is also used, as we have seen for some varieties of chili, though other words are used as well, such as utsu or uchu, from Quechua, or wayk’a from Aymara (Sp. aimara). In Spain, as we said, chilies are called pimientos, though actually, in some contexts the word pimiento is reserved for the sweet (not hot) varieties and guindilla is preferred for the small, red hot ones. The word guindilla is a diminutive of the word guinda, which is the name of a sour cherry or Morello cherry (a sour cherry cultivar), a name of uncertain origin. The guindilla is also known as also known as pimiento de cerecilla (cerecilla is a diminutive of cereza ‘cherry’) or pimiento de las Indias.
In Spain, there are some common types of peppers in addition to guindilla. One is pimiento de Padrón, a variety with small, green and long fruit. Padrón is the name of a parish in the province of A Coruña, in Galicia. An interesting characteristic of these peppers is that some of them are hotter than others (though none are very hot). There is a popular saying in Spain that goes: Los pimientos de Padrón, unos pican y otros no’ ‘pimientos de padrón, some are hot and some (lit. others) are not’ (in Galego: Os pementos de Padrón, uns pican e outros non). What makes this interesting is that when one bites into a Padrón pepper, one never knows whether it is going to be hot or not.
While on the topic of hot vs. sweet peppers, we should mention that what makes a chili hot is the chemical capsaicin, which is concentrated in the inner white fibers of the pepper and in the coat of the seeds. The word
capsaicin—an alteration of
capsicine, a related chemical—is a modern chemical name derived from the New Latin word
Capsicum that French botanist Joseph Pitton de Tournefort (1656-1708) created as the name for the genus of pepper plants.
Capsaicin, however, is only one of the pungent compounds found in chili peppers, though it is the main one. Collectively, they are called capsaicinoids.
The amount of ‘heat’ a pepper has depends in great part on its genetic make-up. Thus, for instance, habanero chilies are much hotter than poblano chilies, which are mild. Environmental conditions such as temperature, drought conditions, and ripeness of the pepper also influence a pepper’s hotness. By the way, the use of the word hot in English to refer to a taste that is pungent, acrid, or biting dates back to the 1540s. It is a sense that is not shared by the Spanish word that translates the main sense of ‘hot’, the high temperature sense, namely caliente. The biting sense translates into Spanish as picante, an adjective derived from the highly polysemous verb picar, some of whose meanings are ‘to bite’ (for insects such as mosquitos), to sting’ (for insects such as bees), ‘to punch’ (a hole in a piece of paper), ‘to chop finely’ (food), ‘to goad’ (a bull), ‘to itch’, ‘to be hot’, ‘to decay, go bad’ (a tooth), ‘to go vinegary’ (wine), and a few more.
The pungency (spiciness or heat) (Sp. picor) of chili peppers and other spicy foods depends on the capsaicin concentration and it is usually measured by the Scoville scale (Sp. escala Scoville). This scale is named in 1912 after its inventor, Wilbur Scoville. The pungency units go from zero for bell peppers to 3.2 million for the hottest of Capsicum chili peppers.
Another popular Spanish chili pepper type is pimiento de(l) piquillo, which is red and triangular. These peppers come from Lodosa in Navarre. Most are typically roasted over embers and then canned. The word piquillo means ‘little beak’, referring to the shape of the pepper.
Finally, there is pimiento morrón, which is the typical name in Spain for any sweet bell pepper, though it is also known as pimiento de bonete, pimiento choricero, or pimiento de hocico de buey. These are the sweetest and meatiest of peppers and they come in different colors, as we have seen: red, green, and yellow. The word morrón is derived from the noun morro ‘mouth, snout, chops, nose (of a car), etc.’ and the name pimiento morrón refers to the bulging shape of the pepper.
There are several words in Mexican Spanish derived from the word
chile, such as
chilar ‘chili patch’, and many referring to foods made with chili:
chilaquil,
chilaquila,
chilate,
chilatole,
chilchote,
chilero,
chilmole,
chiltipiquín or
chilepiquín (Corominas). Another one is
chipotle, from the Nahuatl word
chilpoctli, meaning ‘smoked chili’, which is a smoke-dried jalapeño pepper used in Mexican cuisine.
[ii] This word is also the name of a chain of Mexican restaurants in the United States:
Chipotle Mexican Grill.
[iii]
Figure 171: Smoke-dried chipotles.[iv]
There is also a derived verb enchilar (en-chil-ar) in Mexican Spanish, which means ‘to season with chile’ and, metaphorically, ‘to annoy’. In Mexico and parts of Central America, the reflexive verb enchilarse means literally ‘to get a hot, burning sensation’ as well as, metaphorically, ‘to get angry’.
The adjective enchilado/a ‘seasoned with chili’ is derived from the past-participle of the verb enchilar. The feminine form of this adjective, enchilada, has become the name for a typical Mexican food which has also become popular in the United States. The word enchilada entered English in the late 1800’s with the meaning of ‘tortilla rolled and stuffed usually with a mixture containing meat or cheese and served with a sauce spiced with chili’ (AHD).
Chili can be dried and made into powder, namely
chili powder. This powder, sometimes mixed with chopped chili peppers, can be made into
chili sauce. The word
chili is used in English in some parts of the US South for a popular dish known in Spanish (and in English as well) as
chile con carne, literally ‘chili with meat’, ‘a spicy stew containing chili peppers, meat (usually beef), and often tomatoes and beans’ (Wikipedia).
[v]
Another name for powdered pepper in English is paprika, usually pronounced [pə.ˈpʰɹi.kə], though the pronunciation [ˈpʰa.pɹɪ.kə] is also heard, particularly in Britain. This is ‘a red powder made from a type of sweet pepper, used for giving a slightly hot taste to meat and other food’ (DOCE). This word is a late 19th century loan from Hungarian paprika, a diminutive from Serbo-Croatian papar ‘pepper’, ultimately either from Latin piper or from Greek piperi. This type of powered pepper is very common in these regions. For more on paprika and powdered chile, see §47.3.8 below.
In the list of pepper varieties of the genus Capsicum that we saw earlier, we find several that are derived from place names. One of them is cayenne (pepper) [ˌkeɪ̯.ˈɛn], a type of chili from the species Capsicum annuum. Other varieties of this same species are bell peppers, jalapeños, and paprika. The fruit of this plant is ‘dried and ground, or pulped and baked into cakes, which are then ground and sifted to make the powdered spice of the same name’ (Wikipedia). Cayenne is the main town of French Guiana (founded 1634). It seems, however, that this name is a false or popular etymology. In other words, the original name of the pepper in an indigenous language happened to sound like the name of the town and thus the pepper came to be named after the town (OED). Cayenne pepper also goes by the name of red hot chili pepper or, in powder form, as just red pepper (among other names). In Spanish, the name for this variety also varies from place to place. The most common ones are pimienta roja, pimienta de Cayena, cayena, merkén or, when powdered, chile en polvo, or ají en polvo.
Figure 173: A large cayenne pepper[vii]
Another chile whose name derives from a place name is
jalapeño, which refers to ‘a cultivar of the tropical pepper
Capsicum annuum having a very pungent green or red fruit’ (AHD).
[viii] The word
jalapeño entered English from Mexican Spanish in the mid-20th century. In Spanish
jalapeño is a demonym, a name derived from a place name, from a place, in this case from
Xalapa or
Jalapa, which is the capital of the Mexican state of Veracruz. But
jalapeño is also short for, or a clipping of,
chile jalapeño, that is,
chile from Jalapa (the older spelling is
Xalapa; although Jalapa typically refers to this town of the state of Veracruz, there are other towns with that name in Tabasco, Chiapas, Oaxaca, Guatemala and Nicaragua).
Figure 174: Immature jalapeno (Capsicum annuum var. annuum)[ix]
In the definition of jalapeño above, the word cultivar [ˈkʰʌl.tɪ.ˌvaɹ] was mentioned. We have also been using this word in this section as an alternative for the word variety. The word cultivar refers in botany to ‘a plant variety that has been produced in cultivation by selective breeding’ (COED), one which is not different enough from other varieties to be its own species. The word cultivar was created, in English, in the 1920’s as a blend of the words cultivate and variety (cultivate-variety). There is no escaping the fact that Eng. cultivar is a homograph of the Spanish verb cultivar [kul.t̪i.ˈβaɾ] that means ‘to cultivate’. Eng. cultivar has been used in Spanish in recent times as a loanword from English and only in a limited fashion and as a technical term. The alternative variedad is more common and preferred.
Another type of pepper derived from a place name is
habanero, which refers to ‘a cultivar of the tropical pepper Capsicum chinense having small, round, extremely hot green to red fruit’ (AHD). The word
habanero is a demonym for people and things typical of Havana,
La Habana in Spanish, the capital and main city of Cuba.
[x]
Yet another type of pepper named after a place name, or demonym, is the tabasco pepper, which is of the species
Capsicum frutescens, var.
tabasco, originally from the state of Tabasco in southern Mexico.
[xii] In the United States, the name
Tabasco is associated with a hot sauce made from these chilies and peppered vinegar produced by the McIlhenny Company of Avery Island, Louisiana.
[xiii] The Spanish name for this chili is
chile tabasco. It is not clear where the name of the Mexican state of Tabasco comes from, although there are various theories about it. The most popular one is that it comes from the name of the local indigenous chief (Sp.
cacique, from Arawak
kassequa ‘chieftain’) when the Spanish arrived around 1518.
Figure 176: Tabasco peppers[xiv]
