What's in a Name?
‘There is some confusion about the derivation of the word "chocolate." The Merriam Webster Dictionary, and many other sources, state that it comes from the Aztec, or more accurately Nahuatl (the language of the Aztecs), word chocolatl. Michael Coe, Professor of Anthropology at Yale, and author of The True History of Chocolate, presents a different view. He argues that the word chocolatl appears in "no truly early source on the Nahuatl language or on Aztec culture." He cites the distinguished Mexican philologist Ignacio Davila Garibi who proposed the idea that the "Spaniards had coined the word by taking the Maya word chocol and then replacing the Maya term for water, haa, with the Aztec one, atl." One other possibility is that chocolate is derived from the Maya verb chokola'j, which means, "to drink chocolate together"’ (Spadaccini, 23rd online edition; Young, 1994; Coe et. el., 1996).
Discovered by Christopher Columbus…
It is believed that Christopher Columbus was the first European to discover the existence of cacao tree. It is also believed that Columbus seized some cacao plants from the natives to bring back to Spain. Actually, cacao beans were used as currency for the native South Americans at that time. However, the Spanish King and his court overlooked the value of cacao trees and their seeds’ values. Not until twenty years later when Columbus’s fellow explorer, the Spain's Hernando Cortez, who realized a potential commercial value in the beans when he learnt more from the colonized countries such as Honduras (Young, 1994; Smith, 2000; Spadaccini, 23rd online edition).