A small tropical tree or shrub native to Central America, sometimes valued for its edible fruit or traditional medicinal uses.
From indigenous Mesoamerican languages, possibly Nahuatl or related languages of Central America, the word was preserved in Spanish colonial records and naturalist descriptions.
Central American plants with complex indigenous names often preserve linguistic evidence of pre-Columbian civilizations—each strange-sounding name is a word from a language that was thriving centuries before Spanish arrived.
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