Tobacco is the dried leaf that cigarettes are made from. Grown, cured, cut and rolled.
It came to Europe from the Americas in the sixteenth century and became one of the most profitable crops in history, with consequences that are still being counted. The plant is related to the potato and the tomato. The industry is heavily regulated now, and plain packaging, advertising bans and health warnings are all responses to a product that kills a large proportion of the people who use it as intended.
1nountobaccoThe cured leaves of a plant, smoked or chewed.
“The smell of pipe tobacco was still in the curtains.”
Tobacco reached English through Spanish tabaco in the 1580s, from a Caribbean word meaning either a roll of leaves or the pipe they were smoked in. The plant may well have been named after the instrument.
Spanish
tabaco
English, today
tobacco
Built from
Attested since 1588, Spanish tabaco. The Spanish word could be from Arabic طُبَّاق (“Dittrichia viscosa”) or from a Caribbean language such as car - or tnq - or multiple of them, from a word meaning "roll of tobacco leaves" or "a pipe for smoking tobacco," such as tabago (“tube for inhaling smoke or powdered intoxicating plants”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA