The pineapple presents one of the most charming examples of English going its own way while the rest of the world's languages walk together. In French it is ananas. In German, Ananas. In Portuguese, ananás. In Italian, ananas. In Russian, ananas. In Arabic, ananās. In Japanese, it is either ananas or painappuru, a direct borrowing of the English word. Nearly every language on Earth uses some variant of ananas, a word that traces back to the Tupi-Guaraní word nanas, meaning excellent fruit or exquisite fruit. English, characteristically, chose to call it something else entirely.
The English word pineapple has a history that predates the tropical fruit by several centuries. In Middle English, pineappel was a compound word meaning the fruit of the pine tree, what we now call a pine cone. Pine came from Latin pinus, and apple was used in Old and Middle English as a generic term for any fruit, much as the French pomme originally meant any fruit before narrowing to mean specifically the apple. A pine-apple was simply a pine-fruit
When European explorers encountered the tropical fruit in South America in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they needed a name for it. The fruit's rough, segmented exterior and crown of stiff leaves bore a passing resemblance to a pine cone, and so English speakers applied the existing word pineapple to this spectacular new food. The earliest recorded use of pineapple for the tropical fruit in English dates to around 1664.
This created an ambiguity: pineapple now meant both pine cone and tropical fruit. The problem resolved itself over time. The tropical fruit meaning became dominant as the fruit grew more familiar, and the pine cone meaning gradually became obsolete. By the eighteenth century, pine cone had replaced pineapple for the conifer's seed structure
The Tupi word nanas, which the rest of the world adopted, first entered European languages through Portuguese and Spanish explorers who encountered the fruit in Brazil. The Portuguese brought the fruit to their colonies across Africa and Asia, and the Tupi name traveled with it. André Thevet, a French explorer, described the fruit and its indigenous name in 1557, and ananas was established in French by the late sixteenth century.
Spanish took a middle path, calling the fruit piña, from Latin pinea (pine-related), recognizing the pine cone resemblance just as English did but using a different word for it. The piña colada cocktail takes the first part of its name from this usage.
The pineapple became a symbol of hospitality and wealth in seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe. The fruit was extraordinarily expensive, difficult to transport, and impossible to grow in northern climates without heated greenhouses. Wealthy hosts displayed pineapples at banquets as a sign of affluence and generosity. Pineapple motifs appeared in architecture, furniture
The word apple in pineapple is a remnant of a much older and broader usage. In Old English, æppel could refer to any fruit, and this survives in several compound words and translations. The French pomme de terre (apple of the earth) for potato reflects the same pattern. When the Bible was translated into Old English, the forbidden fruit in the Garden
The pineapple's etymological isolation in English, using a purely descriptive compound where the rest of the world uses an indigenous name, tells us something about how English speakers related to the new foods they encountered during the age of exploration. Rather than adopting the local name, they reached for analogy: this looks like a thing we already know, so we will call it a version of that thing. This domesticating approach contrasts with the more common borrowing strategy used by French, Portuguese, and other colonial languages, which were more willing to import indigenous vocabulary wholesale.