The pineapple (Ananas comosus) is a tropical plant with an edible fruit; it is the most economically significant plant in the family Bromeliaceae.
The pineapple is native to South America, where it has been cultivated for many centuries. The introduction of the pineapple plant to Europe in the 17th century made it a significant cultural icon of luxury. Since the 1820s, pineapple has been commercially grown in greenhouses and many tropical plantations. The fruit, particularly its juice, has diverse uses in cuisines and desserts.
Pineapples grow as a small shrub; the individual flowers of the unpollinated plant fuse to form a multiple fruit. The plant normally propagates from the offset produced at the top of the fruit or from a side shoot, and typically matures within a year.
Etymology
The word pine apple was used by English explorer John Smith referring to the tropical fruit in 1624. The word apple was given during his time for any unfamiliar tree fruit that had a firm, round shape; a pine apple first referred to the cone (fruit) of the pine tree in the 14th century. Gonzalo Hernández Oviedo described the piñas or pomme de pin ("apple of pine") in Hispaniola around 1540.
The first reference in English to the pineapple fruit was the 1568 translation from the French of André Thevet's The New Found World, or Antarctike where he refers to a Hoyriri, a fruit cultivated and eaten by the Tupinambá people, living near modern Rio de Janeiro, and now believed to be a pineapple. Later in the same English translation, Thavet described the fruit as a "Nana made in the manner of a Pine apple", where he used another Tupi word nanas. When it was first discovered by explorers, the Tupi-Guarani and Carib people used it as a staple food with the name, nanas. This usage was adopted in many European languages and led to the plant's scientific binomial Ananas comosus, where comosus ('tufted') refers to the stem of the plant.
