13 Mexican Indigenous Words You Didn’t Know You Were Using

*This is very cool. Many of these I knew, but I had never made the connection between “jacal” and “shack.” VL

By Roque Planas, Huffington Post Latino Voices

Many Americans mistakenly view Mexicans as foreign. In fact, the indigenous people of Mexico have called North America home for a whole lot longer than the Europeans who first started populating the Americas at the close of the fifteenth century. As a reminder, here’s 13 words in Nahuatl, the language of the Mexica people of Central Mexico, that English speakers use all the time — many without knowing it.

• 1
  Avocado
  Getty Images
  Passed into English by way of the Spanish word “aguacate,” the word originates from the Nahuatl term “āhuacatl,” meaning both “avocado” and “testicle,”according to Merriam-Webster.
• 2
  Cacao
  WikiMedia:
  The fruit whose dried seeds are used to make chocolate was originally named cacahuatl.
• 3
  Chocolate
  Flickr:balusss
  The Nahuatl “xocolatl” is made up of the parts “xococ,” meaning “bitter,” and “atl,” meaning “water.”
• 4
  Coyote
  Flickr:joergermeister
  These North American canines take their name from the Nahuatl “coyōtl.”
• 5
  Guacamole
  Flickr:Jürgen Stemper // Bloemche
  The Nahuatl “āhuacamōlli” literally means “avocado sauce.”
• 6
  Jicama
  WikiMedia:
  This vegetable, which is becoming increasingly popular in the United States, bears a name adapted from the Nahuatl “xīcama.

This article was originally published in Huffington Post Latino Voices.

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