Chipotle

How to spell chipotle

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce chipotle

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does chipotle mean?

1. nounA jalapeno chilli that has been ripened, dried, and smoked, used to add a deep smoky heat to food.

Chipotle in a sentence

• The recipe calls for one dried chipotle blended into the tomato sauce.

• She stirred a spoonful of chipotle paste into the marinade for extra smokiness.

Where does chipotle come from?

Language of origin: Spanish

This word travelled into English from Mexican Spanish, which had borrowed it from Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs. The original Nahuatl form was chilpoctli, a compound of chil, meaning 'chili pepper', and poctli, meaning 'smoke', so the name literally describes a 'smoked chili'. That is exactly what a chipotle is: a ripe jalapeno that has been dried and smoked until it turns wrinkled and deep brown. Spanish speakers smoothed the awkward Nahuatl cluster into chipotle, and English adopted it largely through Mexican and Tex-Mex cooking in the twentieth century, with the word becoming widely familiar from the late 1900s onward. The spelling trap is the ending, since the Nahuatl 'tl' survives intact as -tle, which English speakers expect to sound like 'tul' but here is pronounced more like 'lay'.

How the word is built

• chil (chili pepper)
• poctli (smoke), combined in Nahuatl as chilpoctli and reshaped in Spanish to chipotle