Ask an English speaker if they have ever heard of pineapples, and you'll probably just get a confused look. Of course, every elementary school kid has heard of this unique tropical fruit—if not as a produce product, then as a dessert ring, smoothie ingredient, or an essential part of Hawaiian pizza.

But ask an English speaker if they have ever heard of pineapple fruit, and you're likely to get the same confused look, but for exactly the opposite reason. The average English-speaking person has no idea what a pineapple is—even though it is the name for pineapple in almost every other major global language.

In English, German, French, Dutch, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Swedish, Turkish - even in Latin and Esperanto - pineapple Known as ananas, there are different local variations in alphabet and stress. In languages ??that don't have it, it's usually because the word was imported from English, such as Japanese painappuru and Welsh pinafel.

So how did English so spectacularly choose the wrong side of this battle? Doesn't pineapple, no matter what its name is called, taste the same weird and stinging thing?

To find out what is wrong with English as a language, we have to look back to how Europeans first encountered this fruit, native to South America. It was first cataloged by Columbus during his 1493 expedition to Guadeloupe, where they called it pi?a de Indes, meaning "Indian's pine"—not because the plant resembled a pine tree (it didn't ), but because they thought the fruit looked like a pine cone (well...it still doesn't. But you can see it.)

Columbus was on a mission in Spain at the time , the Spaniards dutifully still use the abbreviated form pi?as to describe the fruit. But almost every other European language (including Columbus' native Portuguese) decided to stick with the name given to the fruit by the indigenous Tupi people of South America: ananas, meaning "excellent fruit."

According to its etymology, the English word pineapple was first applied to the fruit in 1664, but that didn't end the great pineapple vs. pineapple debate. Even into the 19th century, there were examples in English of both forms being used together; for example, in the title of Thomas Baldwin's A Practical Guide to Bromeliad Cultivation; or Pine Apple Plant, published in 1813.

So now that we know what these two words mean, why don’t English speakers abandon this illogical and unhelpful linguistic distinction? The ultimate reason may be: we just think our language is better than others.

You see, pineapple was an English word before it was applied to fruit. First used in 1398, it was originally used to describe what we now know as pine cones. Interestingly, the word pine cone was not recorded until 1694, suggesting that applying pineapple to the bromeliad fruit may have meant that people had to find a substitute to avoid confusion. Although ananas lingered on the margins of the language for some time, when given the choice between using local words and foreign, imported words, English used the former so often that the latter essentially disappeared.

Of course, it's not too late to change your mind. If you want to ask for pineapple the next time you order pizza, give it a try (although we can't say what you'll end up getting).