Cocoa

How to spell cocoa

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce cocoa

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does cocoa mean?

1. nounA brown powder made from roasted, ground cacao beans, or the hot chocolate drink made from it.

Cocoa in a sentence

• The recipe calls for two spoonfuls of unsweetened cocoa.

• She warmed some milk and stirred in a mug of cocoa before bed.

Where does cocoa come from?

Language of origin: Spanish

Cocoa is essentially a spelling accident. The plant and its beans were known to Europeans as cacao, a word Spanish explorers picked up from the Nahuatl (Aztec) word cacahuatl, meaning the seed of the cacao tree. Spanish carried cacao into English in the 1500s and 1600s, but eighteenth-century English printers and writers muddled the spelling, blending it with the unrelated word coco (the coconut palm), and the jumbled form 'cocoa' stuck for the ground, roasted bean used in drinks and confectionery. So the modern spelling preserves a centuries-old mistake: the historically correct form is 'cacao', yet 'cocoa' became standard for the processed powder and drink. Knowing that the two letters O really should have been A, O explains why the word looks so oddly repetitive and trips writers up.

How the word is built

• cocoa (an English alteration of cacao, treated as a single unanalysable root)