Caju, Kaju, Cashew: One Word, Travelling the World

Say "kaju" in Sri Lanka or India, "caju" in Brazil or Portugal, "acajou" in France, or "cashew" in English, and everyone pictures the same nut. That's not a coincidence of translation — it's the same word, worn down slightly differently by each language it passed through on its way around the world.

The word's trail starts with the Tupi people of Brazil, whose language gave the tree its first recorded name: acajuba, roughly translating to "the nut that produces itself" — a fair description of a fruit that grows its own seed on the outside, hanging below it, instead of sealed inside like almost every other fruit.

Portuguese traders picked up the word along with the tree itself in the 16th century, shortening acajuba to acajú (and often further to caju) as they carried both across their colonial and trading networks — the same voyages that brought the tree to Sri Lanka, as we covered in an earlier post.

From Portuguese, the word moved into French as acajou, which is still the French word for the tree today. English picked it up from there — by around 1700, English speakers had clipped the French word down and reinterpreted its ending, landing on the spelling "cashew" we use now. A few older English texts even spelled it "cachou" before "cashew" won out.

As the plant spread along the same Portuguese and later Dutch trading routes that reached India, Sri Lanka, and the surrounding region, the word travelled with it and settled into local languages as kaju — the form used today in Sinhala, Hindi, and several other South Asian languages, much closer to the original Portuguese caju than the English "cashew" ever stayed. It's also the word sitting right inside our own name.

The same nut has many names. Spanish speakers usually say anacardo, and in some countries marañón. In Tamil it is mundiri, and the spelling varies when it is written in English letters. The botanical name of the tree is Anacardium occidentale, and the first part is commonly said to refer to the heart-like shape of the fruit. Wherever you are, if you hear a word that sounds a bit like caju or kaju, it is almost certainly the cashew.

In Sri Lanka, kaju is the everyday word, and it appears in dishes such as kaju curry, a creamy curry made with cashews. You will also see it on menus, in shops and in searches, which is why people looking for the price of cashews often type kaju price. It is the same nut and the same product as a cashew, just under its local name. See our kaju price guide and our cashew recipes.

Our own name, Kajuwa, is built on kaju, the word Sri Lankans use for the cashew. You can read how the nut reached the island in the history of cashew in Sri Lanka.

If you enjoyed this, you might also like our guides to the history of cashew in Sri Lanka, Ceylon cashews for Sri Lankans abroad and how a cashew is grown and processed.