Most of you probably know that chili peppers are a New World food, right? There were no chili peppers (the kind with capsaicin in them) anywhere in Eurasia or Africa until Columbus bumped into a continent he wasn’t looking for. So how did English come to call hot, spicy little capsaicin fruits “chili peppers”?
Well, “chili” comes from Nahuatl “chilli,” the Aztec name for capsaicin fruits. And “pepper” is named for the Old World spice pepper. Yup, the stuff you probably have on your dinner table. Before New World capsaicin peppers, the only taste which was kind-of spicy was Old World pepper. European explorers didn’t bother inventing a new name when they already had something to describe the taste, sort of, and unimaginatively just started calling capsaicin fruits “peppers.”
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