Tabasco
name, noun ·Uncommon ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 Alternative letter-case form of Tabasco (hot sauce). alt-of, uncountable, usually
"Robbie adores it when Heather puts tabasco on food."
- 2 A spicy pepper sauce made from tabasco pepper (a chili pepper) with the addition of vinegar and salt. uncountable
- 3 very hot red peppers; usually long and thin; some very small wordnet
- 4 A tabasco pepper. uncountable, usually
"Louisiana is a major producer of tabascos."
- 5 very spicy sauce (trade name Tabasco) made from fully-aged red peppers wordnet
- 1 A state of Mexico.
- 2 A surname.
Example
More examples"I guess it's up to the customer, but Tabasco sauce really completes the dish."
Etymology
See Tabasco.
Of unclear origin. The first definition listed in the 1994 Diccionario enciclopédico de Tabasco was from the Nahuatl name of the area, tlapalco meaning "(place of) damp earth"; wetlands are still extensive in the Mexican state of Tabasco. Other opinions listed were Mayan word tab-uaxac-koh, meaning "(our) lord of eight lions"; others suggest it derives from a Nahuatl word: tla-uashka-ko meaning "place that has an owner", or tlapachtli. The tabasco pepper was popular in the Mexican state and is named for it; a hot sauce made from that pepper was eaten in the state since the 1650s, and a version was popularized in the United States and elsewhere by the McIlhenny Company of Avery Island, Louisiana, beginning in the 1870s.
Related phrases
More for "tabasco"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.