chocolate: [17] Chocolate is one of the contributions made to English by the Nahuatl language of the Aztec people. Their xocolatl was a compound noun formed from xococ ‘bitter’ and atl ‘water’, and therefore when first adopted by European languages (via Spanish) it was used for the drink ‘chocolate’. This was its original sense in English, and it was not for half a century or more that it came to be applied to solid, edible ‘chocolate’.
