The word "chocolate" entered the English language from Spanish.[4] How the word came into Spanish is less certain, and there are multiple competing explanations. Perhaps the most cited explanation is that "chocolate" comes from Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, from the word chocoltl, which many sources derived from xocoltl [okolat], from xococ 'sour' or 'bitter', and tl 'water' or 'drink'.[4] However, as William Bright noted[5] the word "chocolatl" does not occur in central Mexican colonial sources, making this an unlikely derivation. Santamaria[6] gives a derivation from the Yucatec Maya word "chokol" meaning hot, and the Nahuatl "atl" meaning water. Sophie and Michael D. Coe agree with this etymology.
Pointing to various sources dating from the time period of the Spanish conquest, they identify cacahuatl ("cacao water") as the original Nahuatl word for the cold beverage consumed by the Aztecs. Noting that using a word with caca in it to describe a thick, brown beverage would not have gone over well with most speakers of Spanish due to the fact that caca means faeces in Spanish, the Coes suggest that the Spanish colonisers combined the Nahuatl atl with the Yucatec Maya chocol, for unlike the Aztec, the Maya tended to drink chocolate heated. The Spanish preferred the warm Mayan preparation of the beverage to the cold Aztec one, and so the colonisers substituted chocol in place of the culturally unacceptable caca.[7]
The text was was derived from the Chocolate page on Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. It is for educational use in COSC 101, Intro to Computing I, at Colgate University.