The Word Tomato Was Born in the Language of the Aztecs

Say tomato in English, tomate in Spanish or tomat in Russian and you are repeating, almost unchanged, a word that was first spoken in the valleys of central Mexico. The plant is native to the Americas, and so is its name. Both made the long trip to Europe together, and the name has held on remarkably well.

The word began in Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs. There the fruit was called tomatl. It is said to mean something like the swelling fruit, from a verb, tomana, meaning to swell, a fitting name for a fruit that grows plump and round on the vine.

When Spanish ships carried the plant across the Atlantic in the sixteenth century, the word travelled with it. By the middle of that century, Spanish had tomate, which simply swapped the Nahuatl ending for one that sat more comfortably in Spanish mouths. Spanish speakers still say tomate today, so of the three languages here, Spanish kept the word closest to the form it first borrowed.

English borrowed it from Spanish, and for about a century and a half English speakers said tomate too; the form is recorded from around 1600. The spelling tomato appears in 1753, and the change was probably nudged along by potato, a word that had arrived from the Americas a few decades earlier. The two new foods sounded as though they belonged together, so they ended up rhyming. For a while English also used a far more romantic name, love apple. Later, as tomatoes turned into everyday food, English kept adding to the family, and names for tomato dishes and sauces arrived one after another through the nineteenth century.

Russian took an even more interesting path, because it ended up with two words. Tomat comes from the same Aztec root as tomato and tomate. But the everyday word most Russians use for the fruit is pomidor, and that one came from Italian: pomi d'oro, the plural of pomo d'oro, meaning golden apples. Italy had tomatoes on its tables by 1550. So a Russian salad can be described with a word from Mexico or a word from Italy, depending on who is talking.

This kind of travel is typical when a new food arrives in a place. People rarely invent a fresh word for something they have never seen before. They borrow the name from whoever handed it to them, then bend it until it sounds like home.

We know this route because dictionaries of word origins trace each step through written records: the first Spanish uses in the mid-1500s, the English tomate around 1600, the modern spelling in 1753, and the Italian phrase behind the Russian pomidor. So when you slice a tomato, you are holding a fruit that travelled from Mexico, and a word that made the same journey, sounds and all.