Chile is not chilly, chili is not chilly, and never the twain shall meet.
Chili peppers hot,
Chile peppers cold,
Chilly peppers in the pot, nine centuries old.
This, of course, is a recast of the old “pease porridge” nursery rhyme, infused with a different set of concepts to make a point about the verbal porridge representing the relationship between chili peppers, the country of Chile, and the chilly reception you’ll get from etymologists if you suggest that any of these words are connected.
Chili peppers hot: Chili (the pepper and ultimately the stew made with the pepper) traces back through Spanish to the native
7 Here of course we’re talking about careful writers. Speakers are free to say “The throws of” whatever anytime they want; I suspect no one would notice.
South American Nahuatl word for the pepper plant. It is not, as Dutch physician and botanist Jacobus Bontius wrote in 1631, a “quasi dicas Piper e Chile” (“named as if a pepper from Chile,” if my Latin translation is anywhere in the same hemisphere as the actual meaning, but then again, remember that I tried to translate “E Pluribus Unum” by myself as a kid, and could only come up with “made of lead”).
Chile peppers cold: One might say that the etymological trail to Chile has grown cold. Though we’re not sure how the country name originated, no possibilities connect it with the hot pepper plant, and one possibility even suggests that it comes from native tchili, meaning “snow,” from the native South American language Aymara, or a word from the native South American language Quecha: chili meaning “cold” or “snow” or, yes, “chilly.” But even so:
Chilly peppers in the pot, nine centuries old: Our adjective chilly and its source noun chill, meaning “cold,” traces all the way back to Old English. And just to confuse matters, one early spelling of chill was chile.
Why do I spend so much time disassociating chili and Chile and chilly? Well, I hail from the Cincinnati area, where a favorite local dish is a bed of spaghetti, topped with a spiced meat sauce (cinnamon among the spices), chopped onions, beans and grated cheese. This dish is Cincinnati chili, and it, too, has nothing to do with any of the aforementioned chilis. And yes, you Texans and Mexicans and Chileans, we know it's not “real” chili, and, by gosh, we don’t care.