Everyone knows that burrito is from the Spanish meaning "little donkey" (based on the food's resemblance to the animal's back, I assume), but I learned a fun etymology about another delicious Mexican food.
Taco comes from a Spanish word meaning plug or light wadding. It's Germanic, not Romance, in origin, and related to the English word "tack."
So how does that come to mean the tacos we know today? Well, actually it's uncertain. But the best guess, as explained in this Smithsonian article, is:
It dates from the 18th century and the silver mines in Mexico, because in those mines the word "taco" referred to the little charges they would use to excavate the ore. These were pieces of paper that they would wrap around gunpowder and insert into the holes they carved in the rock face. When you think about it, a chicken taquito with a good hot sauce is really a lot like a stick of dynamite. The first references [to the taco] in any sort of archive or dictionary come from the end of the 19th century. And one of the first types of tacos described is called tacos de minero—miner’s tacos. So the taco is not necessarily this age-old cultural expression; it’s not a food that goes back to time immemorial.
However! This is just a theory.
This site states that taco comes from the Nahuatl word tlahco which means "half or in the middle," referring to the way it is formed.
Wikipedia gives space to both ideas. Maybe both are true, and they just converged linguistically by coincidence. Either way, if a taco makes you blow up nowadays, it will be in the bathroom, not in a miner's cave.
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