Tuesday Morning Etymology Lesson: Pineapple!

In most other languages, pineapples are referred to by their scientific name: ananas, which means, aptly, “really good fruit,” and comes from the Tupi languages spoken in South America.  However, because Europeans liked to pretend they discovered everything, when they “discovered” the fruit in the Americas in the 1500s, they dubbed them pine apples because of their resemblance to those things that grow on pine trees back home in Blighty.  (Note: They hadn’t named those “pine cones” just yet. That word doesn’t come up until the mid-late 1600s.)