Fruit and Genitalia: The 'avocados as balls' debate

Some folks say the Aztec word for avocado is the same as their word for testicles . . . but is it true?

They say the word for ‘avocado’ in the Aztec language of Nahuatl literally means ‘testicles.’ Mesoamerican men saw the fruit, looked down at themselves, and named the fruit after their junk. I’ve heard it before, and it sounds too weird to be false. 

But . . . uh . . . is there, like, evidence?

Even one of my favorite historical Instagrammers recently posted about this idea. He at least noted that this might be a euphemism, not the direct word for testicles. After all, in contemporary culture, teenage boys have about six thousand terms for their own genitalia; “avocado” doesn’t seem that much of a stretch. More of a stretch is the idea that someone said, “That there fruit looks like some testicles, I’ll call it ‘testicle fruit.’” and everyone in town agreed with them.

So let’s deconstruct the debate. 

Nahuatl is the language spoken by the ancient Aztecs. It’s still spoken in central Mexico today. It was well-documented in the colonial era and one of the most well-researched indigenous languages in the Americas. We get a lot of words from Nahuatl. Tomato and chocolate are both Nahuatl, and shack may be as well. 

We kind of get the word avocado from Nahuatl, too, but it’s a weird road from the original. Avocado is a folk etymology of aguacate, the Spanish word for the fruit. Aguacate, in turn, comes from a Nahuatl word. This is the word ahuacatl (contemporary spelling awakatl), which is the Nahuatl word for . . . yes, a fruit we call avocados in English. But probably not the Nahuatl word for testicles. 

On any etymology search, the simplest start is a dictionary. A nice old one is usually best. And already we see that both ancient and contemporary Nahuatl dictionaries have a word for testicles that is not ahuacatl. 

The word is atetl. You can search here if you don’t believe me. 

Does ahuacatl somehow come from the word atetl? They both start with a and end in tl. Nope. Ahuacatl seems to be related to a Totonac word for . . . a fruit that isn’t too sweet or too acidic. 

So they didn’t name the fruit after the part of male anatomy. 

But did they nickname the male anatomy after the fruit? 

Magnus Pharao Hansen notes that Francis Karttunen says Alonso de Molina’s dictionary ties ahuacatl to testicles all the way back in 1571. (All of the folks I just mentioned are or were smart people, but it’s still a case of ‘one guy saying another guy says a third guy said.’) 

The copy of Molina’s dictionary available on UNAM does not mention testicles as an alternate definition of avocado. Either Karttunen was wrong or he was using a different source. 

Even if Molina recorded this comparison, though, it doesn’t mean he was right. 1571 is more than 50 years after Cortez’s ill-fated arrival in Mexico, and it’s plenty of time for misunderstandings to develop. While Molina is generally credible, Nahuatl was not his first language. As far as I know there are no indigenous sources from the time that use the word. 

Plenty of Aztec poetry exists. Some of it’s pretty baudy, too. But nobody ruminated on their avocados as far as I know.

Pharao Hansen says awakatl (the usual modern spelling) isn’t used as slang for genitalia today either. (It’s mentioned in the 2004 Mecayapan dictionary, but that dictionary was also composed by majority non-native speakers, so the prevalence of its usage is definitely debatable.)

More likely, according to this source, the Spaniards were the ones who noticed that the fruit looked not like human genitals but sheep testicles. Please don’t google them to see if I’m right; I did and it was horrible. And I can report back that, while most are light-colored, darker ones do bear a noticable resemblance to an avocado. (Remember that there were no sheep in the Americas before the Spaniards arrived.)

At best, the Nahuatl word for avocados was only very rarely used as a euphemism, and it was probably used more by the Spaniards than actual indigenous folks. 

I hate to be the one to ruin a meme, so the fact that the Spaniards thought of them as testicles is still amusing, right? If you’re really into the idea of your fruit looking like genitals, there is historical precedent. 

But the Nahuatl word for avocado does not mean testicles, and there is little evidence that Aztec people used it to refer to the body part. 

As always, I could be totally wrong, so feel free to rake me in the comments if you’ve got a contrary source! (Like, a real source, not just Twitter.)