A single fruit has been called a golden apple, a wolf peach, and a love apple. Sometimes all three names showed up in the same century.
Tomato names pile up fast. Most retellings smooth over the parts historians actually disagree on.
This guide sorts out which name has a real paper trail and which one does not. It works from the historical record, not the version that gets repeated the most.
The short version
The word tomato traces to the Nahuatl word tomatl, by way of Spanish. Early Italian writers called the fruit pomi d’oro, golden apple, describing the color it turned as it ripened.
Love apple has a real dispute behind it. It may come from a genuine aphrodisiac belief, or from a French mistranslation of an unrelated Italian phrase.
Wolf peach, the old scientific name Lycopersicon, has a documented Greek meaning. Who actually coined it, and when, is murkier. A popular witch and werewolf legend attached to that name has no clear original source.
Tomato: the word itself
The English word descends from Spanish tomate, borrowed from the Nahuatl word tomatl. The University of Oregon runs an Online Nahuatl Dictionary project built on real historical sources.
Citing a 1571 account by the missionary Alonso de Molina, the project defines tomatl as a fruit used in stews and sauces. There is a twist most naming articles skip entirely, though.
In Nahuatl, plain tomatl usually meant the small green husk tomato, the plant known today as tomatillo. The larger red fruit had its own separate name, xitomatl.
Spanish colonizers appear to have collapsed that distinction. They carried the word tomatl into Europe attached to the red fruit instead.
For the plant that kept the original name, see this site’s guide to tomatillo versus tomato at https://knowtomato.com/tomatillo-vs-tomato/.
Golden apple: pomi d’oro
The earliest Italian name with a real paper trail is pomi d’oro, golden apple. A 1548 letter to Grand Duke Cosimo I of Florence already uses that name, reporting that tomatoes from his own estate had arrived safely.
Physician and botanist Pietro Andrea Matthioli adopted the term formally in his 1554 Latin edition of Dioscorides. He described the fruit as ribbed like a melon.
It started green, he wrote, turning gold in some plants and red in others. He noted it was colloquially called pomi d’oro.
That color detail matters. The name likely reflects the yellow varieties that reached Italy first, well before red became the color gardeners associate with tomatoes today.
For the fuller timeline of tomatoes reaching Italy, see this site’s guide at https://knowtomato.com/when-did-tomatoes-come-to-italy/.
Love apple: a real dispute, not a settled story
Pomme d’amour, love apple, is where the record splits into two competing explanations. One holds that the French genuinely believed the fruit was an aphrodisiac and named it accordingly.
The other comes from peer reviewed research on 16th century tomato names. It argues the term was likely added by a French translator working from Matthioli’s text.
Under that theory, the phrase was a mangled version of pome dei Moro, apple of the Moors. That original phrase referred to where the fruit was believed to have traveled from, nothing romantic at all.
A third detail complicates the story further. The German botanist Leonhart Fuchs had already used the near identical phrase amoris poma for a different plant back in 1542, the eggplant.
Both plants sit in the same nightshade family. The name may have simply drifted from one to the other rather than being invented fresh for the tomato.
No source settles which explanation is correct.
Wolf peach: an old name with a genuinely disputed history
Lycopersicon, the tomato’s longtime scientific name, comes from Greek roots meaning wolf and peach. North Carolina State University’s Extension Gardener Plant Toolbox confirms that literal translation for the species epithet.
Who actually coined the name, and when, is where sources disagree. Research on 16th century tomato naming suggests Renaissance botanists reached for the term while trying to match tomatoes to an obscure plant.
That obscure plant traces back to the ancient physician Galen, whose original description was never entirely clear. A tomato genetics nomenclature report from the University of Wisconsin tells a different part of the story.
It credits the French botanist Joseph Pitton de Tournefort with formally coining Lycopersicon in 1694. That is over a century after Matthioli’s golden apple.
Both accounts can be true at once. An informal Renaissance guess may have simply been formalized by Tournefort later.
No single source lays out that full chain with hard dates, though. One popular version of the wolf peach story adds a darker layer.
It claims German folklore linked the fruit to witches using it to transform into werewolves. That version shows up constantly in casual retellings.
No primary historical source for it turned up in the research behind this guide. That is worth knowing before repeating it as settled fact.
For the deeper story of how tomatoes earned a reputation as dangerous, see this site’s guide to why tomatoes were thought poisonous at https://knowtomato.com/why-were-tomatoes-thought-poisonous/.
What American gardeners actually called it
Formal etymology is one record. Everyday speech is another, and it left its own paper trail.
The Dictionary of American Regional English is a University of Wisconsin project built from field surveys of real speakers. It recorded several tomato nicknames still in use well into the 20th century.
Respondents offered maters and tomaters, both clipped dialect forms common in the American South and Appalachia. Others gave tommy toes, a folksier variant, and love apples.
That last one matters. It shows the old European name survived as everyday American speech long after science moved on to Lycopersicon, and eventually to Solanum.
Frequently asked questions
Where does the word tomato actually come from?
It comes from the Nahuatl word tomatl, by way of Spanish tomate. Nahuatl originally reserved tomatl for the small green husk tomato, now called tomatillo, and used a separate word, xitomatl, for the larger red fruit.
Why was the tomato once called a golden apple?
Because the earliest tomatoes reaching Italy included yellow varieties. Physician and botanist Pietro Andrea Matthioli documented the Italian name pomi d’oro, golden apple, in his 1554 edition, describing fruit that ripened from green to gold or red.
Is love apple really connected to an aphrodisiac belief?
That is one theory, but not the only one. Peer reviewed research on 16th century tomato naming argues the French term may instead be a mistranslation of an Italian phrase meaning apple of the Moors, with the aphrodisiac story added afterward.
Is the witch and werewolf story behind wolf peach actually true?
There is no clear primary source for it. The Greek meaning of Lycopersicon, wolf peach, is well documented, but the popular werewolf legend attached to that name could not be traced to an original historical account.
What did ordinary Americans call tomatoes before modern names settled in?
Field survey data from the Dictionary of American Regional English recorded maters, tomaters, tommy toes, and love apples as real, commonly used nicknames. Some are still heard in parts of the South and Appalachia today.
Bottom line: tomato names carry more real documented history than most retellings let on, and also more open disputes. The word itself traces cleanly to Nahuatl, and golden apple has a dated paper trail through a 1548 letter and Matthioli’s 1554 edition. Love apple and wolf peach both rest on genuine scholarly disagreement rather than one tidy origin story, and where the record runs out, the honest answer is that it runs out, not a legend repeated until it sounds like fact.
SOURCES
North Carolina State University Extension Gardener Plant Toolbox: Solanum lycopersicum, Tomato. https://plants.ces.ncsu.edu/plants/solanum-lycopersicum/
PeerJ: Sixteenth Century Tomatoes in Europe, Who Saw Them, What They Looked Like, and Where They Came From. https://peerj.com/articles/12790/
University of Wisconsin Madison, Spooner Lab: Report of the Tomato Genetics Cooperative, Nomenclature for Wild and Cultivated Tomatoes. https://vcru.wisc.edu/spoonerlab/pdf/TGC%20Report%20nomenclature%20for%20wild%20and%20cultivated%20tomatoes.pdf
University of Wisconsin Madison, Dictionary of American Regional English: Survey Results, Vegetables and Fruits. https://dare.wisc.edu/surveys/survey-results/1965-1970/vegetables-and-fruits/i21/
University of Oregon, Wired Humanities Projects: Online Nahuatl Dictionary, Tomatl. https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/tomatl