Animals and nature

Fifteenth on this list is o pinheiro, and behind it stands the oddest naming accident in ordinary English. For three hundred years « pineapple » was not a fruit at all. It was the cone of the pine: older English used « apple » for fruit in general rather than for one species, so the pine’s fruit was the pine’s apple, and medieval writers meant that and nothing else. Then European ships met a plant in the Caribbean whose fruit is scaly, oval and about the size of a cone, and the sailors used the picture they had. The name moved across, the cone lost it, and English has been obliged to say « pine cone » ever since for the thing that owned the word first. Hardly any other language followed. Portuguese took the plant’s own name instead, and in Portugal the fruit is o ananás, from naná, a Tupi-Guarani word carried back across the Atlantic, while Brazil settled on o abacaxi. So a reader who ever wondered why one English fruit is named after a tree it never grows near now has the answer: o pinheiro is where the name was taken from.