The word "avocado" comes from a Nahuatl word that also meant "testicle"

Order guacamole and you are unknowingly speaking Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs — and you are a step removed from one of its more anatomical jokes.

The fruit’s name comes from Nahuatl ahuacatl, “avocado.” Crucially, that same word carried a secondary, euphemistic sense: “testicle.” The Online Etymology Dictionary records ahuacatl as meaning avocado “with a secondary meaning ‘testicle’ probably based on resemblance” — the way the fruits hang, often in pairs. The Franciscan friar Alonso de Molina listed both senses in his 1571 Nahuatl dictionary.

Here’s the nuance worth getting right: the botanical meaning came first. Scholars of Nahuatl stress that “testicle” was a euphemism layered onto the fruit-name, not the original meaning — roughly how English speakers came to call testicles “nuts.”

So avocados aren’t named after testicles; rather, testicles got nicknamed after avocados.

From there the word migrated. Spanish borrowed it as aguacate, then reshaped it — by folk-etymology pull toward abogado, “lawyer” — into the avocado English adopted by the 1700s.

And guacamole? It descends from Nahuatl ahuacamolli, simply “avocado sauce” — molli means sauce. Despite a popular claim, it never meant “testicle sauce”; that reads a slang euphemism back into a word that only ever meant the dish.