Cocoa is the bitter brown powder that chocolate is made from. Cocoa powder, a cup of cocoa, cocoa beans.
It is made by fermenting, drying, roasting and grinding the beans of the cacao tree, then pressing out most of the fat, which is cocoa butter. Cocoa also names the hot drink made from it. Cocoa solids percentage on a chocolate bar tells you how much of it is cocoa rather than sugar. Note cacao, which is the tree and the raw bean, and cocoa, which is the processed powder.
1nouncocoaThe bitter brown powder chocolate is made from.
“Add two spoonfuls of cocoa to the flour to make a chocolate cake.”
2nounhotA hot drink made from that powder.
“She made cocoa every night for about thirty winters.”
cocoa is a food substance.
Spanish cacao comes from Nahuatl cacahuatl, the Aztec name for the bean. Cocoa is an English misspelling of cacao that stuck, probably by confusion with coconut, which is an entirely different plant.
Spanish
cacao
English, today
cocoa
Borrowed from Spanish cacao. From Spanish cacao, from nci cacahuatl. The form cocoa came about by confusion with coco, popularized by Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language. a doublet of cacao.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in Food & Drink