The first recorded use of chocolate as a color name in English was in 1737.[2]
This color is a representation of the color of the most common type of chocolate, milk chocolate.
The word chocolate entered the English language from Spanish.[3] How the word came into Spanish is less certain, and there are multiple competing explanations. Perhaps the most cited explanation is that "chocolate" comes from Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, from the word "chocolātl", which many sources derived from the Nahuatl word "xocolātl" made up from the words "xococ" meaning sour or bitter, and "ātl" meaning water or refreshment.[3] However, as William Bright noted[4] the word "chocolatl" does not occur in central Mexican colonial sources making this an unlikely derivation. Santamaria[5] gives a derivation from the Yucatec Maya word "chokol" meaning hot, and the Nahuatl "atl" meaning water. More recently[when?] Dakin and Wichmann derive it from another Nahuatl term, "chicolatl" from Eastern Nahuatl meaning "beaten drink".[6] They derive this term from the word for the frothing stick, "chicoli".
Cocoa brown (web color "chocolate") (light chocolate)
Chocolate is created from the cocoa bean. A cacao tree with cocoa bean fruit pods (which are filled with cocoa beans inside of them) in various stages of ripening
Quick Facts Cocoa Brown Cinnamon, Color coordinates ...
The web color called "chocolate" is displayed at right. This color is actually the color of the exterior of an unripe cocoa bean pod and is not the color of chocolate, a highly processed product, at all. The historical and traditional name for this color is cocoa brown.[7]
The first recorded use of cocoa brown as a color name in English was in 1925.[8]
This color may also be referred to as light chocolate or cinnamon.[9]
Animals
Dogs with a dark brown coat are considered to be chocolate colored. The most common breed is the Labrador Retriever
Chocolate City is a name that, since the 1970s, has been applied in African American slang to Washington, D.C., because of its overwhelmingly African American population. Nowadays, it is also used to refer to the black neighborhood of a particular city, or the collectivity of black neighborhoods in urban areas throughout Northern America. The term is also used for websites, blogs, etc. that are designed to appeal to African Americans. For example, Chocolate City magazine is an "urban lifestyle and nightlife magazine" that features models, events, and celebrity interviews and pictures from Chicago and Oakland, California.[10]
Chocolate Starfish were an Australian rock music group based in Melbourne, Australia, releasing a number of hits in the early 1990s, before disbanding in 1998.
On the 2011 TV show The Playboy Club, Naturi Naughton played Bunny Brenda, who is seeking to be the first African American Playboy Playmate (the show takes place in the early 1960s, and at that time no African American had yet been chosen to be a Playboy Playmate.). She referred to herself on the show as the chocolate bunny.[11]
The color displayed in the color box above matches the color called chocolate in the 1930 book by Maerz and Paul A Dictionary of Color New York:1930 McGraw-Hill; the color chocolate is displayed on page 39, Plate 8, Color Sample H10.
Maerz and Paul A Dictionary of Color New York:1930 McGraw-Hill Page 192; Color Sample of Chocolate: Page 39 Plate 8 Color Sample H10 Note: the color shown above as "chocolate" matches the color sample in this book shown as "chocolate"
Campbell, Lyle. Quichean Linguistic Prehistory; University of California Publications in Linguistics No. 81. Berkeley, California: University of California Press. p.104.
Maerz and Paul A Dictionary of Color New York:1930 McGraw-Hill Color Sample of Cocoa Brown: Page 53 Plate 15 Color Sample C11 Note: the color shown above as "cocoa brown" matches the color sample in this book shown as "cocoa brown".
