It's been a while since my last major etymological thread, but I was eating some great spicy food yesterday and decided it was time for ....

Mexican X, Part XVII

Hot Xalapeños!

1/

"Jalapeño" is short for “chile jalapeño.” That suffix -eño makes nouns and adjectives out of place names (isla, “island” becomes isleño, “islander,” for example). It evolved from -ineus, a Greek / Latin adjectival suffix that indicated material or color.

2/

So a "Jalapeño" is someone or something from the Mexican city of Xalapa, Veracruz. As I’ve shown previously in this series, “x” in 16th-century Spanish was pronounced [sh] (and was used to represent that sound in Indigenous Mesoamerican words as well).

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“J,” which had been pronounced like the “z” in “azure,” had also pretty much shifted to [sh] by the Conquest. But the [sh] sound became /x/ (a hard [h] like Scottish “loch”) by the end of the 1500s.

That’s why we don’t say “shalapeño.”

4/

Xalapa is from Nahuatl “xālāpan.” It has 3 parts:

-xālli -> sand
-ātl -> water
-pan -> suffix used in place names (“beside”)

It’s often analyzed as a compound of xālli & āpan (beside the water): “sand beside water” (spring, river, lagoon, etc.) or “at water amidst sand.”

5/

But it’s more likely a combination of xālātl (“sandy water,” i.e. “water flowing through sandy terrain”) and -pan: “place where water flows through sand.” A few early dictionaries define “xālātl” as “weak fountainheads,” and indeed, chronicles of the time claim ...

6/

... that the city arose in the 13th century when Toltec and Totonac settlements around three nearby springs combined into a single community.

An oasis where the dry tropical zone of the coast meets the humid temperate zone of the central plateau.

7/

The perfect birthplace for a pepper that would spread throughout Mexico and then the entire world.

Clearly the Nahuas of Xalapa didn’t call this pepper a “jalapeño.” Instead, their word for it was “chīlchōtl” which sounds like “chile that makes one cry.”

8/

(It's perhaps an evolution of an unattested *chīlchōctli.)

In fact, to this day some Mexican communities still call it “chilchote.”

There are too many varieties of jalapeño to write about, but I do want to bring your attention to a fact that many folks still don’t know.

9/

The Nahuas began the custom of drying chiles with smoke to preserve them longer.

The smoked, dried version of the jalapeño? My favorite of all time: the chipotle pepper.

Its name comes from “chīlpōctli,” a compound of “chīlli” and “pōctli,” meaning “smoke.”

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Whether you like your xalapeño green & fresh or smoky & dry, always remember to thank the inhabitants of that distant oasis, who plucked peppers from bushes that rose almost miraculously from the sandy soil, there beside the fountainheads where mountains meet the coast.

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Addendum: a red, spicier variety of the jalapeño (cultivated in Oaxaca, among other places) is called "huachinango," from the Nahuatl "cuauhchīlnācatl," meaning "with flesh like the cuauhchīlli" (a small red pepper known in Spanish as chile de árbol, a literal translation).

12/

Interestingly, "huachinango" is also the name in Mexican Spanish of the red snapper, whose meat is a distinctively red color that reminds one of the small, round chiles and the similarly hot big red variety of jalapeño.

13/13

Addendum 2.

As I mentioned, "Jalapeño" also means "person from Xalapa."

In Nahuatl, that would be "Xālāpanēcatl," plural form "Xālāpanēcah."