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[16] Tobacco was introduced to Europe from the Americas, and that is where its name came from too. It originated in a Carib word, and reached English via Spanish and Portuguese tabaco. What precisely the Carib word meant, however, is a matter of dispute. Some say that it referred to tobacco leaves rolled up into a cylindrical shape for smoking, while others maintain that it denoted a pipe for smoking the tobacco in. The word has spread to virtually all European languages (French tabac, German, Dutch, Russian, and Czech tabak, Welsh tybaco, etc), and only a few remnants of alternative terms remain: Romanian tutun and Polish tytun, for instance, borrowings from Turkish tütün, which originally meant ‘smoke’, and Breton butun, which came from pety, the word for ‘tobacco’ in the Guarani language of South America (source also of English petunia [19], a close relative of the tobacco plant).
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