A small wild plant or herb of South America, possibly used in folk medicine or cooking, or the edible roots of such plants.
From Spanish chirivita, a diminutive form suggesting 'little chiri-', possibly derived from indigenous South American languages, though the exact root is uncertain. Used in regional cooking and traditional medicine.
Chirivita is one of those ultra-regional plant names that shows how colonizers collected indigenous botanical knowledge without always understanding what they were collecting—it might be one plant, or it might be several confused under one name!
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