It is sweet to reflect, as you savour a bar of chocolate, that you are also consuming a little of the ancient Aztec language, Nahuatl. The Aztecs called the juice from the pods of the cacao tree xocoatl, which meant “bitter water”. The Spaniards first adopted and then adapted this pretty word, and the English misheard it from Spanish, as chocolate. The Aztecs may have gone, but their language lives on, in Quality Street, Mars and Easter eggs.

Food is surely the single most important conveyer of words between and among languages. Early travellers traded in exotic goods, but also in words. Just as our palates were changed and expanded with foreign tastes, so the English language has been constantly enriched by new and strange food words, which were themselves gradually absorbed into everyday speech.

Chocolate was only one element of the linguistic banquet laid on by the Aztecs. They gave us guacamole, chilli and tomato, the supposedly aphrodisiac qualities of which persuaded hopeful Italians to dub it the “golden apple”, pomodoro. Some Nahuatl words were quite indigestible. Tlilxochitl, for example, was a prized delicacy meaning “black flower”. The Spanish simply couldn't get their tongues around it, so Willem Piso, a Spanish doctor serving under the governor of Brazil, renamed it vanilla (meaning “little sheath”).

Avocado comes from the Nahuatl term for testicle, on account of its shape. This piece of information may explain the collapse of the Aztec empire. It is amazing they could even walk.

Such linguistic delicacies are the amuse-gueules of Henry Hitchings' The Secret Life of Words, a fascinating exploration of the rich borrowings, exchanges and couplings of the language. This is not a book about food words but almost every page offers a new insight into the way food has shaped language.

Fewer than one quarter of words in English reflect its Germanic origin: the rest have been plundered (a Swedish word) from other tongues, and frequently via the kitchen table. Words travel in much the same way as trade and tastes in food, so different cultures have adapted and served different food words in different ways.

Food words invade with the invaders. Wine, pepper, butter, radish all came to English from the Roman invasion. Cheese is related to the Latin caseus. The Norman Conquest brought a banquet of table words, as sophisticated French cookery colonised simpler Saxon fare. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that the Normans invented English cooking words: Saxon animals (sheep, pig, cow) became Norman terms when cooked and seasoned: mutton, pork and beef. More exotic words followed: gravy, mustard, liquorice.

Food words were exported from wherever the empire spread. And when no word was easily available for import, its very foreignness became its description. Walnut, for example, comes from Old English walhnutu, which means “foreign nut”, since the first walnuts seen in Britain came from Italy.

Sugar was introduced to Western Europe by Berbers about 1,000 years ago, from the Arabic sukkar. The roots of apricot can be dug back, via Spanish, to the al-burquq, a fruit introduced to Andalusia by the Arabs. Marzipan may take its name from a Burmese city, and orange grew from the Sanskrit word for the citrus tree, naranj. When a weird-looking vegetable from the Mediterranean appeared in Britain in the early 16th century, English tongues simply adopted its Arabic name, al-kharshuf, and mangled it into English: artichoke.

Squash was adapted from a word in the Native American language Narragansett, askutasquash, meaning “vegetable eaten while green”. Kedgeree comes from the Hindi khichiri. The word miso first appears in English in the logbooks of William Adams, the Elizabethan trader and adventurer.

Spices blazed their own etymological trail. Coriander, slightly unnervingly, comes from the Greek word for bedbug, koris: apparently coriander smells of crushed bedbugs. Potato is a Spanish corruption of the Carib batata, a solid, round, tuberous word that somehow fits.

Some words match the food they describe, and some do not. The word margarine was invented by Hippolyte Mège-Mouriès in 1869 and was adapted from the far more poetic Persian term murwarid, meaning pearls, a reference to the fatty droplets that formed marge. “It's name is far lovelier than its taste,” Hitchings reflects. “If only we could disassociate the two.”

While English was almost omnivorous, a few food words have been too big to swallow. Early visitors to Hawaii were thrilled to find a fish called a humuhumunukunukupuaa, but as a food, and a word, it never caught on. Some words, like some foods, are best consumed where they originate.

The Secret Life of Words by Henry Hitchings
John Murray, £16.99

Explore Books

• Book Extracts

• Book Reviews

• Books Group

• Audio Books

Times Recommends

• The 100 Best Books of the Decade
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• The conversation: James Ellroy