So what *is* the Latin word for “chocolate”?

Question

Obviously, the Romans didn’t know anything about chocolate, since they had no access to any of the places cacao grew naturally. By the time Europe did learn of its existence, even ecclesiastical Latin was past its heyday. Nonetheless, Google Translate infamously offers scelerisque, more properly translated “and of the wicked deed.”

Is there any consensus on a neo-Latin word for “chocolate”? Has it shown up in a Catholic epistle or something by any chance? (I seem to recall an amusing discovery in high school that the Vatican had invented a Latin term for “hot pants” but I can’t find that list any more.) Or a compelling reason to think a particular coinage (even if unattested) would be “the right way” to say it?

Answer 1

Latin actually had staying power in the late Renaissance and a few centuries thereafter. We have plenty of treatises from 17th century Europe written in Latin about chocolate, and the word they used is most often chocolat-. You can find a short bibliography on Vicipaedia, though that article (anachronistically?) opted for socolata.

Such early works include:

• a translation of Ledesma's 1631 history of chocolate, Chocolata inda: opusculum de qualitate et natura chocolatae.

This is a clear first declension noun, and not a bad way to go, in my opinion.

• Cardinal Brancati's 1664 treatise, De chocolatis potu diatribe, which includes two poems on chocolate, "In laudem potionis chocolaticae".

The form in this work is chocolates, -is. (He also mentions cacao, but quickly glancing it over, I don't see where he might have included inflected forms of that word.)

You also have the form cocolates in the 1689 poem "De mentis potu, sive de cocolatis opificio." There "cacao" is cacaum, a neuter second-declension word.

This last word attests to the first letter being a voiceless velar plosive (k-), not a sibilant (s-), so I would probably rule out socolata, unless there's additional evidence I didn't come across.