The names of the months, Part 2: The first four months

[This entry is an excerpt from Chapter 22, "The calendar and the names of the months", of Part II of the open-source textbook Spanish-English Cognates: An Unconventional Introduction to Spanish Linguistics.]

Introduction

The fact that our solar calendar has months of around 30 days, as we have seen, is a direct result of the fact that at one point time was reckoned by the phases of the moon, which are approximately a month in length (29.5 days). The Roman calendar originally had ten months. The names of the first four of the original ten Roman months in Latin were derived from the names of Roman gods and goddesses, perhaps because of their connection to the agricultural cycle. Actually, the name of one of the months, April, is not as clearly derived from the name of a god as the other ones are, as we shall see.

The following are the names of those first four months in the early Roman calendar that consisted of only ten months. Note that the numbers of the months do not correspond to their current numbers. As we shall see, two more months were added to the calendar at a later point and those months were added at the beginning of the year, not at the end, which resulted in the numbered months to be off by two. The names of these four months are shortened from phrases containing the noun mēnsis ‘month’, which was later elided. The remaining parts were originally possessive adjectives. Thus, we find here a case of ellipsis of the noun in a noun+adjective phrase which resulted in the adjective being nominalized or becoming a noun.

Month 1: mārtĭus (mēnsis) ‘(month) of Mars’

The first month was named after the Roman god Mārs (accusative: Mārtem; regular stem: Mārt‑)), the god of war (cf. Part II, Chapter 21, §21.3.2). This god is also the source of the name of one of the days of the week, namely Lat. mārtis ‘of Mars’ from where comes the name of the day martes ‘Tuesday’ in Spanish (cf. Part II, Chapter 21).

The possessive adjective mārtĭus (mārt‑ĭ‑us) ‘Martian, of Mars’ was derived from the stem mārt‑ of the god’s name and the derivational suffix ‑ĭ‑ that turned nouns into adjectives, plus the inflectional first declension inflexional ending ‑us. This possessive adjective was similar in meaning to the genitive case wordform of the name Mars, namely mārtis that we just saw. It is from the word mārtĭus that that we get the month names Eng. March ~ Sp. marzo.

Sp. marzo is a patrimonial Spanish word which displays the sound change from Latin ‑tĭ‑ (before another vowel) to Old Spanish ‑ʦ̪‑ and, then, to Modern Spanish ‑z‑, pronounced [θ] or [s], depending on the dialect (cf. Part I, Chapters 7, 10, and 11).

m	ā	r	t	ĭ	ŭ	s
m	a	r	z		o

Eng. March is a loanword from Old French dialectal march(e), also a patrimonial descendant of mārtĭus in this language. The more common Old French spelling of this word was marz. In Modern French, it is mars.

In later Roman times, another adjective was derived from the stem mārt‑ĭ‑ of mārtĭus, by addition of the third declension adjectival suffix ‑āl‑, resulting in mārtĭālis (mārt‑ĭ‑āl‑is) ‘of or belonging to Mars or war’ (because it is a third declension suffix, it takes the nominative inflection ‑is‑, which is both masculine and feminine, cf. Part I, Chapter 8). This is the source of Eng. martial /ˈmaɹ.ʃəl/ ~ Sp. marcial /maɾ.ˈθi̯al/, as in Eng. martial law ~ Sp. ley marcial, and Eng. martial arts ~ Sp. artes marciales. Not all phrases formed with this word exist in both languages. Thus, Eng. martial music is música militar in Spanish and  Eng. court martial, a mid-17th century phrasal loanword from French, literally ‘war court’, translates into Spanish as tribunal de guerra or consejo de guerra.

Eng. martial is a 14th century loanword from Latin. Sp. marcial is also a Latin loanword, first attested in the early 17th century, in Cervantes’ El Quijote. Note that the Latin ‑tial ending was changed to ‑cial in Spanish spelling, as usual in Spanish words from Latin. That is because in Old Spanish, the Latin letter combination ‑ti between two vowels came to be pronounced the same way as the Latin sound combination ‑ci anywhere, namely [ʦ̪i] or [ʣ̪i], depending on the context. Other words where we can see the Lat. t ~ Sp. c alternation are: ausencia < absentia (cf. Eng. absence), potencia < potentia (cf. Eng. potency), gracia < gratia (cf. Eng. grace), ciencia < scientia (cf. Eng. science). Note that English cognates tend to have a c also, if they came into the language through French, but not otherwise, as in the case of Eng. martial ~ Sp. marcial, or Eng. presidential ~ Sp. presidencial.

Most other European languages also have names for this month that descend from the Latin word either through natural descent or through borrowing, e.g. Catalan març, Portuguese março, Italian marzo /ˈmaɾ.ʦ̪o/, German März, Norwegian and Swedish mars, Danish marts, Hellenistic Greek μάρτιος (Mártios), Russian март (mart), Polish marzec, Turkish mart, Arabic مارس‏ (mars), and Basque martxo (another, autochthonous or homegrown Basque name for this month is epail ‘pruning month’, from epai ‘cut, prune’).

Month 2: aprīlis (mēnsis)

The name of the second Roman month was aprīlis, from where we get Eng. April and Sp. abril. It is not totally clear what the origin of this word is and there are several hypotheses. Some believe that it comes from the name of an Etruscan goddess Apru, which would be derived from or related to the Greek Ἀφροδίτη (Aphrodítē), known as Aphrodite in English and Afrodita in Spanish. Aphrodite was the Greek goddess of beauty and love, equivalent to the Roman goddess Venus.

The Etruscans exerted great influence on early Rome and the Etruscans themselves were greatly influenced by Greek culture, which is why this theory makes sense. However, the existence of an Etruscan name Apru is only hypothesized and it is not attested in Etruscan writing. We do know that the Etruscans themselves called the same month Cabreas. On the other hand, another connection between Aphrodite and this month is that in Roman religion, Venus was the tutelary deity (guardian, patron or protector) of this month.

Of course, the Romans themselves did not know the origin of the name of this month. Some Roman authors speculated that the name of the month was related to the verb aperīre ‘to open’, the source of patrimonial Sp. abrir ‘to open’. The reason would obviously be that this is the month when many plants and flowers open up after the winter months.

English got the name of this month from Old French, first attested around the year 1300. In Old French, it was avril, as it is still is in Modern French, but by the late 14th century, English had changed the spelling of this word to make it more like the original Latin word, by changing the v to p. As we will see, Eng. april replaced the Old English name for this month, Eastermonað, which, interestingly, but not surprisingly, was also named after a fertility goddess. As usual, the substitution was not sudden and for a while in Middle English both names were used indistinctly.

Sp. abril is obviously a patrimonial descendant from Lat. aprīlem, the accusative wordform of aprīlis. A Latin p in that position always became b in Old Spanish and first the final m and then much later the final e (before consonants like l) were dropped.

In most other European languages the name for this month also stems from the Latin word, e.g. Catalan abril, Portuguese abril or abriu, Italian aprile, Dutch april, German April, Swedish april, Russian апре́ль (aprélʹ), Arabic أبريل‏ (ʾabrīl), and Basque apiril.

Month 3: māius (mēnsis) ‘Maia’s (month)’

The month of May was called māĭus (mensis) in Latin, almost certainly after the Roman goddess Māĭa, goddess of fertility. The Latin adjective māĭus ‘of May’, pronounced /ˈmaːj.jʊs/, was the masculine nominative form (it had to be masculine to go with the noun mēnsis, which was masculine), and its feminine form was māĭa, a homophone of the name of the goddess. On the other hand, this Lat. māĭus had homophones of its own, since māĭus is also the neuter form of the comparative adjective māior ‘greater, larger’, comparative form of the Latin adjective magnus ‘great’ and source of Sp. mayor and Eng. major and mayor (cf. Part II, Chapter 19). There is another Latin word māĭus, which was an short for (an elliptical form of) Māĭusdeus ‘great god’, another name or appellation (way to refer to) for the god Jupiter.

The goddess Maia was daughter of Atlas, wife of Vulcan, and mother of Mercury. The name of this goddess is thought to come from the Proto-Indo-European root *meǵh₂‑ ‘great’ and so it could have meant originally something like ‘great one’. This is also the root from where the Latin adjectives for ‘great’ and ‘greater’ that we just saw come from. Therefore, the name Maia would share its root with those adjectives and their descendants, as well as with all words derived from the same root in Latin and Greek, such as the following ones:

• PIE *méǵh₂-s ‘great, etc.’ > A.Gk. μέγᾰς (mégas) ‘big, large, great’; e.g. Eng./Sp. mega‑, as in Eng./Sp. megabyte, Eng. megaton ~ Sp. megatón, Sp. megafonía ‘sound amplification’
• PIE *méǵh₂-is‑ > Lat. magis (adverbial form of magnus) ‘more, more greatly, etc.’, source of más ‘more’ and also found in words like Eng. master ~ Sp. maestro (< Lat.  măgister ‘chief, head, director, leader’), Eng. mastery ~ Sp. maestría, Eng. mister
• PIE *maǵ-yes- greater’ > Lat. māi‑ (māius, māia, māior, etc.), e.g. Sp. mayor and Eng. major and mayor
• PIE *m̥ǵh₂-nós > Lat. magnus ‘great’, e.g. Sp. magnífico/a, Eng. magnificent, Sp. magnate ~ Eng. magnate
• PIE *méǵh₂-lo-s > A.Gk. μεγᾰ́λος (megálos), cf. Eng. megalomaniac ~ Sp. megalómano, Eng. megalopolis ~ Sp. megalópolis

From Lat. māĭus, the name of the month, we get Eng. May /ˈmeɪ̯/ and Sp. mayo /ˈma.ʝo/. Eng. May can be seen as an early 12th-century loanword from Old French mai (which is still spelled mai in Modern French, now pronounced [ˈmɛ]) but because Lat. maius was also common in writings in Latin in the Old English period,  Eng. May replaced the Old English (Anglo-Saxon) name Þrīmeolce and Þrīmilcemōnað (see below).

As usual, the names for this month in English and Spanish have cognates in most other European languages, e.g. Portuguese maio, Italian maggio, Dutch mei, German Mai ), Swedish and Danish maj, Russian май (maj), Arabic مايو‏ (māyū), and Basque maiatz (also known as loreil ‘month of flowers’). 

Month 4: iūnĭus (mēnsis) ‘Iuno’s (month)’

Figure 112: Statue of Juno, Vatican, Rome, Italy.[i]

Just like the month of May was named after a goddess, so was the month of June, the fourth month of the original Roman calendar. It was named after the goddess Iūnō (genitive: Iūnōnis; regular stem: Iūnōn‑). The name of the goddess is spelled Juno in both English and Spanish and it is pronounced /ˈʤu.noʊ̯/ in English and /ˈxu.no/ in Spanish. She was the Roman goddess of love and marriage and queen of the gods. She was daughter of Saturn, mother of Mars and Vulcan, and sister of Jupiter, as well as his wife in some interpretations of Roman mythology. She was the patron goddess of the city of Rome as well as of the Roman Empire. This goddess was the equivalent to the Greek goddess Hera.

Some think that the name goes back to the same Proto-Indo-European root as Lat. iuvenis ‘youth’ (same in the nominative and genitive; accusative: iuvenem), the source of Sp. joven ‘young; youth’, and also the same root as iūnior ‘younger’, the source of Eng. junior (genitive: iūniōris, regular stem: iūniōr‑). The original meaning of this root supposedly was something like ‘vital force’ or ‘vital energy’.

The name of the month was iūnĭus mēnsis or mēnsis iūnĭus, which by ellipsis was reduced to iūnĭus. Actually, Lat. iūnĭus is thought to be a contraction of iūnĭonĭus (see above) and it can be analyzed as consisting of the stem Iūn‑ of the goddess’s name and the ending ‑ĭus, of which the ‑ĭ‑ part was a derivational suffix that created first/second declension adjectives and the ‑us part the nominative inflection: Iūn‑ĭ‑us; regular stem: Iūn‑ĭ‑. From Lat. iūnĭus, pronounced [ˈjuː.nɪ.ʊs] in Classical Latin, we get Eng. June /ˈʤun/ and Sp. junio /ˈxu.ni̯o/.

The word June is attested in English as early as 1100, in the Anglo-Saxon chronicle for that year. In some contexts of early use we can see it as a borrowing from Latin, but in others as an Old French loanword, as this name for the month slowly came to replace the Anglo-Saxon name for the month, Ǣrra Līða (see §22.7 below). The spelling of the word varied a great deal both in Old French and in Anglo-Norman, the Old French dialect spoken by the invading Normans in England, such as join, junye, junie, jun, juin, etc., until finally settling on June.

Other European languages have borrowed the name of this month from Latin as well, resulting in cognates of the English and Spanish names, e.g. Catalan juny, Portuguese junho, Italian giugno, Dutch and Swedish juni, German Juni, Russian июнь (ijúnʹ), and Arabic يونيو‏ (yūniyō). (The Basque name for this month is not a loanword this time. This most common name for the month in Basque is ekain, which seems to be derived from eki ‘sun’ and gain ‘top’, for June is when the sun is at its highest.)

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[i] Source: By William Henry Goodyear - Brooklyn Museum, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=31058846

The names of the months, Part 1: Introduction to the Roman calendar

[This entry is an excerpt from Chapter 22, "The calendar and the names of the months", of Part II of the open-source textbook Spanish-English Cognates: An Unconventional Introduction to Spanish Linguistics.]

Like so many of our institutions, the calendar that is used in the English- and Spanish-speaking worlds is derived from the Roman calendar. We saw this already when we looked at the names of the days of the week, even the fact that we have a seven-day week. This does not mean that the Romans invented the calendar outright, for they borrowed liberally from other cultures, but their calendar is the one that ours is built upon, including the names of the days of the week and of the months of the year. There has only been one change to the calendar since Roman times, the one introduced by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582 CE (see below).

Even the cognate words Eng. calendar /ˈkæl.ən.dəɹ/ and Sp. calendario /ka.len.ˈd̪a.ɾi̯o/ come from Lat. Kălendārĭum or călendārĭum, a word that meant ‘account book, debt book, money-lender’s book’. This word călendārĭum (călend-ār-ĭ-um) was derived from the noun kalendae ‘calends’ (kalend‑ae), which literally meant ‘the called’, referring to the first day of the month, which originally was the start of the moon cycle and the day that debts were paid. In other words, Lat. călendārĭum did not mean what it means today. By the time English borrowed the word calendar around the year 1200 from Old French calendier, a loanword from Latin, these words already had the meaning they have today, among other senses. Sp. calendario is also a borrowing from Latin, not a patrimonial word, and it is first attested around the year 1300.

The word kalendae is a plural nominative wordform whose singular form kalenda was actually never used. English and Spanish have both borrowed this word, but also in the plural, Eng. calends /ˈkæləndz/ ~ Sp. calendas, to refer to ‘the first day of the month in the ancient Roman calendar’ (COED). The calends were significant in part because monthly interest payments on loans were due on the calends in Roman times, as well as because of other significant events took place on or around those dates. It was often written with a k in Latin since it was a very early borrowing from Ancient Greek. The noun kalendae (root cal‑) is related to the verb calāre ‘to announce solemnly, call out’ and it referred to the priests’ calls and proclamations about the new moon (principal parts: calō, calāre, calāvī, calātum). This verb was also a loan from Ancient Greek κᾰλέειν ‎(kaléein), which was cognate with Lat. clāmāre ‘cry out, clamor, shout’, the source of Sp. llamar and Eng. claim (cf. Part II, Chapter 14). Both verbs go back to Proto-Indo-European root *kelh₁‑ ‘to call, summon’, which has left no direct descendants in English (Eng. call does not descend from that root).

It is interesting to note that the Romans did not number the days like we do, but rather spoke of the days with respect to three fixed dates within each month: the kalends, which as we just saw referred to the first day (of the following month), the nones, which was either the 5th or the 7th day of the month, and the ides, which was the 13th or the 15th day. Thus, for instance, April 23 was written IX Kal. Mai., which was read as ‘the 9th day before the Kalends of May’.

Similarly, we should note that numbers were not used to name the years, like we do now, but rather they were typically reckoned with respect to important years, such as the year of accession to power of an emperor or, before Rome became an empire, according to which two men were consuls that year. However, there was also a, less common, method of counting years from the presumed year of the founding of the City of Rome, 1 AUC (Lat. ab urbe condita ‘from the founding of the City’), which supposedly corresponds to 753 BCE.

The current custom of numbering the years after the presumed birth of Christ dates back from the year 525 CE, when Dionysius Exiguus, a Christian monk, proposed the new system and reckoned that year 1 was the year that Jesus was born, resulting in the era  Anno Domini ‘year of the Lord’ that we now follow. Dionysius had to guess the exact year that Jesus was born and it is widely believed that he got the year wrong.

The Roman calendar, from which we get ours, went through a great deal of tweaking over the centuries until they finally got it (almost) right under Julius Caesar in 46 BC, 708 years after the founding of Rome. The early Roman calendar was extremely complicated and underwent numerous modifications over those seven centuries.[i] The original calendar was not a solar calendar, but a lunar one, as was the norm 2,500 years ago. It had ten months, each with either 29 or 30 days, since the actual lunar cycle, the average time between full moons, was 29.5 days. The resulting calendar had 304 days, a couple of months short of the solar cycle, which is approximately 365.25 days long.

Figure: Sun and Moon, Schedel's Nuremberg Chronicle, 1493, attributed to Albrecht Dürer

The word for month in Latin was mēnsis, the source of patrimonial Sp. mes. Several of the Latin names of months originated as adjectives in Latin, which would modify the noun mēnsis that meant ‘month’. This noun eventually was dropped from the phrase, a process known as ellipsis, giving us the Latin names for the months that we know today. Thus, for instance, mārtius mēnsis ‘Mars’s month’ as shortened to mārtius, the source of Eng. March ~ Sp. marzo (see the next section).

Lat. mēnsis is said to descend from the Proto-Indo-European noun *mḗh₁n̥s, which meant both ‘moon’ and ‘month’, and which is probably derived from the root *meh₁‑ ‘to measure’. This is likely due to the fact that the phases of the moon were one of the first things used by the ancients to measure time. Our calendar reckons time by the phases of the sun, not the moon, and thus our calendar is a solar calendar not a lunar calendar. Still, lunar calendars have not disappeared from the picture, as we shall see, and they are still used by some cultures.

Another word that descends from the same Proto-Indo-European root *mḗh₁n̥s is Eng. moon, which makes Eng. moon and Sp. mes ‘month’ cognates in the historical-patrimonial sense (cf. Part I, Chapter 1).

PIE mḗh₁n̥s (stem *méh₁n̥s-) ‘moon; month’
Proto-Germanic *mēnô ‘moon’	Proto-Italic: *mēns-
Old English mōna	Latin mēnsis (acc.: mēnsem)
English moon	Spanish mes

Eng. moon is cognate with (not a cognate of) the English word month /ˈmʌnθ/, for this latter word is derived from the original Proto-Indo-European root by addition of some suffix, no doubt so as to distinguish the two meanings, ‘moon’ and ‘month’, for which Proto-Indo-European used one and the same word. The Proto-Germanic word for month was *mēnōþs and the Old English descendant was mōnaþ. The words moon and month in English are not full cognates but only semi-cognates, since they share the stem, but not all the affixes. In other words, month was derived from moon, so to speak, at some point in Germanic by the addition of a suffix, one which is not recognizable as such today.

You may be wondering why the Latin word for moon, lūna, from which comes Spanish luna ‘moon’, looks nothing like the English word moon. That is because at some point in an ancestor language of Latin, the name of the moon was changed to lūna. This word is ultimately derived from the Proto-Indo-European root *lewk- ‘bright’. The Proto-Indo-European word that Lat. lūna comes from has been reconstructed as *lowksneh₂, which probably meant something like ‘the bright one’.

The calendar and keeping track of time was of enormous importance to the Romans, as well as to all ancient, agricultural peoples. The keeping of the calendar in Ancient Rome, which was more an art than a science, due to their limited knowledge of the earth cycles, was the job of the Pontifex Maximus, meaning ‘greatest pontiff’. The word pontifex (accusative wordform: pontĭfĭcem - pont‑ĭ‑fĭc‑em

) referred to the high priests of the Roman religion and it seems to be a compound word that seems to have meant ‘bridge-builder’, since it is derived from the root pont‑ (source of Sp. puente ‘bridge’) and the root of the verb facĕre ‘to do’ (source of Sp. hacer; cf. Chapter 36).[ii]

The office of Pontifex Maximus was the most important position in the Roman religion, for this man was the highest priest of the Collegium Pontificum ‘College of pontiffs or high priests’. Julius Caesar was the Pontifex Maximus from 63 BCE until his death in 44 BCE. After Rome became Christian, in the 4th century CE, the word pontifex came to be used for bishops in the Roman Catholic Church. Eventually it came to be used primarily to refer to the bishop of Rome, namely the pope. The Latin word pontifex has given us the cognates Eng. pontiff and Sp. pontífice, which are used to refer to the Roman Catholic pope, the highest priest of the Roman Catholic church. Since, at least in theory the term can also be used for any bishop, the term sumo pontífice is sometimes used when referring to the pope in Spanish (cf. Part II, Chapter 43). The derived adjectives are Eng. pontifical and Sp. pontificio/a.

In Table 164 below, you can see a summary of the names of the months in Latin as well as the reflexes of those names in English and Spanish, which are, of course, cognates. Notice that the names of the months are not capitalized in Spanish, just like the names of the days of the week are not either. (In this chart, we have added the macron, or mark for long vowels, but we have kept the Roman spelling 〈V〉 that represented the vowel [u], semivowel [u̯] and semiconsonant [w].)

Latin	Meaning	English	Spanish
iānVāriVs	Janus’s (month)	January	enero
febrvārivs	Februa’s (month)	February	febrero
mārtivs	Mars’s (month)	March	marzo
aprīlis	?Apru’s (month)	April	abril
māivs	Maia’s (month)	May	mayo
iV̄nivs	Juno’s (month)	June	junio
iV̄livs	(Gaius) Julius (Caesar)	July	julio
avgvstvs	(Emperor) Augustus	August	agosto
september	seventh month	September	se(p)tiembre
octōber	eighth month	October	o(c)tubre
noVember	ninth month	November	noviembre
december	tenth month	December	diciembre

Table 164: Names of the months in Latin, English, and Spanish

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[i] Cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_calendar, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_calendar

[ii] Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Caesar, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pontifex_Maximus

Spices and herbs, Part 5: Eng. chili (pepper) and Sp. chile/pimiento/ají

[This entry is an excerpt from the chapter "Spices and herbs" of Part II of the open-source textbook Spanish-English Cognates: An Unconventional Introduction to Spanish Linguistics.]

Go to the listing of entries on spices, herbs and other condiments

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),[1] 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’.[2]

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).[3]

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‑.[3] 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.[4] 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]

Figure 172: Pot of chile con carne[vi]

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]

Figure 175: Habanero[xi]

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]

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[1] This pepper is the main ingredient in Tabasco sauce, which is very popular in the United States. This sauce was invented in 1868 by a Mexican company, which was later bought by McIlhenny Company in Louisiana.

[2] Eng. pubescent comes ultimately from the accusative wordform pūbēscentem of the same word pūbēscēns. It means ‘reaching or having reached puberty’ or else ‘covered with short hairs or soft down’ (AHD). This Latin verb derives from the adjective pūbēs ‘of ripe age, adult, pubescent’ (gen. pūberis). Eng. pubis ‘either of a pair of bones forming the two sides of the pelvis’ (COED), ‘pubic bone’, comes from the genitive wordform pūbis of Lat. pūbēs, being short for os pūbis ‘bone of the pubes’. Eng. pubes comes from Lat. pūbēs and it can mean either ‘the lower part of the abdomen, especially the region surrounding the external genital organs’ or ‘the hair that appears on this region at puberty’ (AHD), though not all dictionaries include this second meaning. The Spanish word pubis covers the meanings of both Eng. pubes and pubis, but not the sense ‘pubic hair’ of Eng. pubes. That sense translate as vello del pubis.

[3] There is another word baccātus in Latin, namely the passive participle of the verb baccārī, an alternative form of the verb bacchārī, which meant ‘to celebrate the festival of Bacchus’ and ‘to revel, rave, rant, like the Bacchæ’ (L&S). (The Bacchæ [ˈbæ.ki], also known as bacchāntēs—pronounced [ˈbækənts], [bəˈkʰænts], or [bə.ˈkʰɑnts]—were priestesses of the god Bacchus. In Roman mythology they were the equivalent to the maenads [ˈmi.nædz] in Greek mythology, from Gk. μαινάδες (mainádes; lit. ‘the raving ones’), followers of the god Dionysus, equivalent to Bacchus in Greek mythology.)

[3] For more on frequentative Latin verbs, see Part I, Chapter 8, §8.4.3.6. From the supine stem pict‑ and the noun-forming suffix ‑ūr‑a we also get the cognates Eng. picture ~ Sp. pintura, which are semi-false friends. The come from from Latin pictūra, which meant ‘the art of painting’, but also ‘a painting’. Both are loanwords from Latin, but Spanish pintura received the n that the related patrimonial word pintar had.

[4] How Pitton came up with this name is not totally clear. According to the OED, ‘Linnæus explained it from Gr. κάπτειν ‘to bite’ (rather ‘to gulp down’); but it is generally referred to Lat. capsa ‘case, box’, as if named from the pods’.

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[i] Cf. https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chile_piqu%C3%ADn
[i] Source: “Madame Jeanette and other chillies” by Takeaway - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Madame_Jeanette_and_other_chillies.jpg#/media/File:Madame_Jeanette_and_other_chillies.jpg

[ii] Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chipotle

[iii] Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chipotle_Mexican_Grill

[iv] Source: “Chipotlestipicos” by Badagnani - Own work. Licensed under CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chipotlestipicos.jpg#/media/File:Chipotlestipicos.jpg

[v] Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chili_con_carne

[vi] Source: “Pot-o-chili” by FiveRings at English Wikipedia. Licensed under CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pot-o-chili.jpg#/media/File:Pot-o-chili.jpg

[vii] Source: “Large Cayenne” by André Karwath aka Aka - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.5 via Wikimedia Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Large_Cayenne.jpg#/media/File:Large_Cayenne.jpg

[viii] Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jalape%C3%B1o

[ix] Source: Immature jalapeño pepper (Capsicum annuum var. annuum). From https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bild:PICT1195.JPG, originally uploaded 02:05, 2. Jul 2005 by de:User:TilmanBaumann, being his own GFDL-licensed work. (2015.11.03) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Immature_jalapeno_capsicum_annuum_var_annuum.jpeg

[x] Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habanero

[xi] Source: “Habanero closeup edit2”. The original uploader was Fir0002 at English Wikipedia - Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons by Sreejithk2000 using CommonsHelper. Licensed under CC BY 2.5 via Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Habanero_closeup_edit2.jpg#/media/File:Habanero_closeup_edit2.jpg (2015.11.03)

[xii] Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabasco_pepper, https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chile_tabasco

[xiii] Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabasco_sauce

[xiv] Source: “Tabasco peppers”. Licensed under Public Domain via Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tabasco_peppers.JPG#/media/File:Tabasco_peppers.JPG