Sweet potato
Names

Although the soft, orange sweet potato is often called a " yam " in parts of North America, the sweet potato is very distinct from the botanical yam (Dioscorea), which has a cosmopolitan distribution, and belongs to the monocot family Dioscoreaceae. A different crop plant, the oca (Oxalis tuberosa, a species of wood sorrel), is called a "yam" in many parts of the world.

Although the sweet potato is not closely related botanically to the common potato, they have a shared etymology. The first Europeans to taste sweet potatoes were members of Christopher Columbus 's expedition in 1492. Later explorers found many cultivars under an assortment of local names, but the name which stayed was the indigenous Taíno name of batata. The Spanish combined this with the Quechua word for potato, papa, to create the word patata for the common potato.

Though the sweet potato is also called batata (בטטה) in Hebrew, this is not a direct loan of the Taíno word. Rather, the Spanish patata was loaned into Arabic as batata (بطاطا), owing to the lack of a /p/ sound in Arabic, while the sweet potato was called batata ḥilwa (بطاطا حلوة); literally ('sweet potato'). The Arabic batata was loaned into Hebrew as designating the sweet potato only, as Hebrew had its own word for the common potato, תפוח אדמה (tapuakh adama, literally 'earth apple'; compare French pomme de terre).

Some organizations and researchers advocate for the styling of the name as one word— sweetpotato —instead of two, to emphasize the plant's genetic uniqueness from both common potatoes and yams and to avoid confusion of it being classified as a type of common potato. In its current usage in American English, the styling of the name as two words is still preferred.

In Argentina, Colombia, Venezuela, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic, the sweet potato is called batata. In Brazil, the sweet potato is called batata doce. In Mexico, Bolivia, Peru, Chile, Central America, and the Philippines, the sweet potato is known as camote (alternatively spelled kamote in the Philippines), derived from the Nahuatl word camotli. In Peru and Bolivia, the general word in Quechua for the sweet potato is apichu, but there are variants used such as khumara, kumar (Ayacucho Quechua), and kumara (Bolivian Quechua), strikingly similar to the Polynesian name kumara and its regional Oceanic cognates (kumala, umala, ʻuala, etc.), which has led some scholars to suspect an instance of pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact. This theory is also supported by genetic evidence.

In Australia, about 90% of production is devoted to the orange cultivar 'Beauregard', which was originally developed by the Louisiana Agricultural Experiment Station in 1981.

In New Zealand, the Māori varieties bore elongated tubers with white skin and a whitish flesh, which points to pre-European cross-Pacific travel. Known as kumara (from the Māori language kūmara), the most common cultivar now is the red 'Owairaka', but orange ('Beauregard'), gold, purple and other cultivars are also grown.
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