The color chocolate or cocoa brown is a shade of brown that resembles chocolate. At right is displayed the color traditionally called chocolate. The first recorded use of chocolate as a color name in English was in 1737. This color is a representation of the color of the most common type of chocolate, milk chocolate.

Etymology

The word chocolate entered the English language from Spanish. How the word came into Spanish is less certain, and there are multiple competing explanations. Perhaps the most cited explanation is that "chocolate" comes from Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, from the word "chocolātl", which many sources derived from the Nahuatl word "xocolātl" made up from the words "xococ" meaning sour or bitter, and "ātl" meaning water or refreshment. However, as William Bright noted the word "chocolatl" does not occur in central Mexican colonial sources making this an unlikely derivation. Santamaria gives a derivation from the Yucatec Maya word "chokol" meaning hot, and the Nahuatl "atl" meaning water. More recently Dakin and Wichmann derive it from another Nahuatl term, "chicolatl" from Eastern Nahuatl meaning "beaten drink". They derive this term from the word for the frothing stick, "chicoli".

Variations of chocolate

Cocoa brown (web color "chocolate") (light chocolate)

The web color called "chocolate" is displayed at right. This color is actually the color of the exterior of an unripe cocoa bean pod and is not the color of chocolate, a highly processed product, at all. The historical and traditional name for this color is cocoa brown. The first recorded use of cocoa brown as a color name in English was in 1925. This color may also be referred to as light chocolate or cinnamon.

Chocolate in human culture

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