Mexican X Part XVII: Hot Xalapeños
4 min readAug 31, 2020
I’ve eaten both Ethiopian and Korean food with jalapeño peppers, so I thought it was time to explore the etymology of this worldwide phenomenon.
“Jalapeño” is short for Spanish “chile jalapeño” or “jalapeño pepper.”
The suffix -eño makes nouns and adjectives out of place names (for example isla, “island” becomes isleño, “islander”). It evolved from -ineus, a Greek and Latin…
