Avocado

How to spell avocado

7 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce avocado

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does avocado mean?

1. nounA pear-shaped fruit with a large stone, leathery green or dark skin, and soft green flesh, eaten as a vegetable.

Avocado in a sentence

• She mashed a ripe avocado onto her toast for breakfast.

• The salad needed one more avocado to feed everyone.

Where does avocado come from?

Language of origin: Spanish

The word travelled into English from the Spanish aguacate, which the Spanish in turn took from the Nahuatl (Aztec) word ahuacatl, the name for the fruit of a tree native to Mexico and Central America. In Nahuatl the same word also meant 'testicle', a reference to the fruit's shape and the way the fruits often hang in pairs. Spanish speakers, struggling with the unfamiliar Nahuatl sounds, reshaped aguacate into avocado, a form that happened to coincide with the Spanish word avocado meaning 'advocate' or 'lawyer', so folk association nudged the spelling along. English picked up the word in the early 1600s, and for a long stretch it was also known by the playful nickname 'alligator pear' because of its rough, dark, leathery skin. The modern spelling trap is simply that there is one c, one d, and a single l-free ending in -ado, with no doubling anywhere despite how substantial the word looks.

How the word is built

• avocado (an unanalysable borrowing; no productive prefix, root, or suffix in English, from Spanish aguacate via Nahuatl ahuacatl)