A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1054 entries
cochineal
Cochineal is a scale insect that lives on prickly pear cactus under a white waxy fluff, and it is the source of one of the strongest natural reds ever found. The insects are brushed off the pads, dried, and ground. It takes roughly 70,000 of them to make a pound. The color comes from carminic acid, which the insect makes to deter predators, and it dyes wool and silk a scarlet nothing in the Old World could match.
Etymology
The Spanish word came from Latin and Greek words for a berry, because European dyers had long assumed that the small dried red bodies of dye insects were seeds. That mistake runs through the whole vocabulary of red. The same Greek root gives coccus, used for round bacteria, and Latin vermiculus, little worm, which described a different dye insect and gave English vermilion. The Aztec name — nocheztli — from Nahuatl nochtli (prickly pear cactus) plus eztli (blood) — was different and accurate: It translates as cactus blood.
Notes
After silver, cochineal was the most valuable export from Spanish America for two hundred years, and Spain kept the source secret so successfully that Europeans argued about whether it was a plant or an animal until the eighteenth century. It is still used, listed on labels as carmine or E120, and it is why some strawberry yogurt is not vegetarian.