2799: You Say Tomato… Aug 19, 2024

Some say tomáto, and some say tomāto, as it were, but there were several other important terms for it that have left their mark in small corners, here and there.

Given how newly introduced—relatively speaking—the tomato was introduced into Old World, it is unsurprising that most European languages have a similar word for it, but it's even more common than other words for new-world foods like potatoes, and maize (both Taino words originally) squashes, and beans. 

On the other hand, while many languages, especially around coalesced around something like ‘tomato’ (from Nahuatl ‘tomatl’), there were many other terms that cropped up including “wolf peach”, which is actually where the scientific name comes from “Solanum lycopersicum” from “lyco-” (c.f. ‘Lycanthrope’; lupine) and ‘persicus’ (peach) literally meaning ‘of Persia’. This didn’t take off so much, but beyond being the source of the Latin name, it goes along with a long tradition of not eating tomatoes because they were deemed poisonous due to the botanical relation to nightshade (same genus). 

Another name for them, on the opposite end of the spectrum, was “love apples” or variations thereof like German Liebesapfel, which is probably from a later association with the tomato as an aphrodisiac. This is why in Hebrew it is known as עגבניה (agvania) from the root ע-ג-ב also meaning ‘lust’ and ‘buttocks’, even though most other languages moved past this older term. 

There is another, less likely, theory, that this term developed since in Spanish it was called “pomi dei mori” (apple of the Moors) based off a misunderstanding of the Italian “pomi d’oro” (golden apple) in reference to its color—not being so ubiquitously red like now—and that it was misunderstood in French as “pomme d’amour” (apple of love) but this would be far more unlikely.