Buzz
Written by James Hunt
If you ask someone who speaks English if they've heard of a pineapple, you'll likely just see a confused expression. Surely, everyone knows this unique tropical fruit—whether as fresh produce, a ring in a dessert, a smoothie addition, or a key ingredient on a Hawaiian pizza.
However, if you ask if they've heard of the ananas fruit, you'll probably get a similarly confused look—but for a different reason. The typical English speaker won't recognize what an ananas is, despite it being the name for the pineapple in nearly every other major language across the world.
In languages like Arabic, German, French, Dutch, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Swedish, and Turkish—along with Latin and Esperanto—the pineapple is called an ananas, with only slight variations in spelling and accent. In the few languages where it isn’t, the term is typically borrowed from English, such as in Japanese パイナップル (painappuru) and Welsh pinafel.
So, how did English end up on the losing side of this naming debate so dramatically? Would a pineapple, no matter what you call it, still taste as peculiar and prickly?
To understand where English took a wrong turn, we need to go back to the moment when Europeans first discovered this fruit, which is native to South America. Columbus’s 1493 expedition to Guadeloupe cataloged the fruit, calling it piña de Indes, which means "pine of the Indians"—not because the fruit resembled a pine tree (it doesn’t), but because they thought it resembled a pine cone (although, that’s debatable).
Columbus was on a Spanish mission, and, as expected, the Spanish still use the shortened version piñas to refer to the fruit. However, nearly every other European language (including Portuguese, Columbus’s own language) chose to stick with the name given by the indigenous Tupí people of South America: ananas, which means "excellent fruit."
Etymological sources suggest that the English term pineapple was first used for the fruit in 1664, but this didn’t settle the debate between pineapple and ananas. As late as the 19th century, both names were used simultaneously within the English language; for instance, in the 1813 title of Thomas Baldwin’s Short Practical Directions For The Culture Of The Ananas; Or Pine Apple Plant.
Given that we understood what both terms meant, why didn’t English speakers abandon this confusing and unnecessary linguistic difference? The simplest answer might be: We just believe our language is superior to others.
The word pineapple actually existed in English before it was used for the fruit. First recorded in 1398, it originally referred to what we now call pine cones. Interestingly, the term pine cones didn’t appear until 1694, suggesting that the use of pineapple for the ananas fruit probably came about to avoid confusion. Although ananas lingered in the language for a while, when given a choice between a local term and a foreign one, English speakers favored the former so frequently that the latter faded into obscurity.
Of course, it's never too late to change our minds. If you’d like to ask for ananas next time you're ordering pizza, feel free to give it a go (though we can’t predict what might happen!).
