ananas

The Tupi people of coastal Brazil called their prized fruit nanas, meaning excellent fruit. When Portuguese sailors arrived in the early 1500s, they adapted the name to ananás and carried the plant back to Lisbon. André Thevet described it in his 1557 account of Brazil, and botanical illustrations spread the fruit's image across Europe within a decade. Every European language that adopted the pineapple took the Tupi name with it.

By the time Charles de l'Écluse documented the plant in his 1601 Rariorum Plantarum Historia, spelling it ananas, the word was fixed across learned Europe. French used ananas, German Ananas, Italian ananas, Russian ананас. Early English writers used ananas too, and variant spellings like anana appeared in 16th-century texts. But English speakers also called the fruit a pine-apple because its exterior resembled the cone of a pine tree.

The competition between ananas and pineapple in English lasted through the 17th century. By the time the fruit became a luxury commodity in Britain, displayed at aristocratic tables and carved into gateposts as symbols of welcome, pineapple had won. English became the only major European language to abandon the Tupi original. The rest of the world still says ananas every day without knowing it is speaking the language of a people who are mostly gone.

The botanical name, Ananas comosus, assigned by Philip Miller in 1754, preserved the Tupi word in scientific Latin. Hawaii, which became the world's dominant pineapple producer in the 20th century, grows a fruit whose scientific name traces back to a Brazilian language spoken four centuries before Hawaii's first commercial plantation opened. The name outlasted the political structures, the trade routes, and the speakers who first attached it to the fruit.