You say etymology cornér, I say etymology corner! I wanna talk about tomatoes! And just to warn y’all I’m gonna get a little ranty and stray away from etymology because the Colombian exchange is FASCINATING.

So pre-Colombian Mexicans named this fruit they cultivated tomatl because the Nahuatl language is very fond of putting L’s after T’s. Tomatl comes from tomana meaning “to swell” and translates to something like fat water thing. Later Azteca named them xitomatl after breeding them to be even bigger and that just means “fat water thing with navel”. Tomatoes have belly buttons, y’all!

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