cacao and chocolate, the rich frothy drink prepared from it, havelong been the focus of intellectual curiosity both because of theirimportance in Mesoamerica and as highly valued contributions tothe rest of the world. Such interest includes many efforts to iden-tify the linguistic origins of both terms, because those origins carrywith them implications of the historical importance of the speak-ers of the source language. Although both words were borrowedinto Spanish from Nahuatl,
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the facts that the cacao beans comefrom southern Mesoamerica and not the central Nahuatl area andthat chocolatl (/
cˇokola:tl
/), the written form of the word for ‘choc-olate’ later found more generally in Spanish and Nahuatl docu-ments, does not appear in early Colonial Nahuatl sources fromcentral Mexico, have led linguists and ethnohistorians to look fornon-Nahuatl origins for both words.In this paper, we explore a contrasting hypothesis and considerthe possibility that both terms may be bona fide Nahuatl word