The Arawak indians had a word for pipe as in smoking pipe , and it's a common word related to pipes. What was it?

It’s a classic case of mistaken identity in the world of words. When Spanish explorers first made contact with the Taíno people of the Caribbean, a subgroup of the Arawak, they observed the indigenous practice of smoking dried leaves. The instrument used for this ritual, often a Y-shaped tube for inhaling the smoke through the nostrils, was called a "tabaco" by the native population.

The Spanish explorers, however, misunderstood. They adopted the word but mistakenly applied it to the plant being smoked rather than to the pipe itself. This linguistic error was then carried back to Europe along with the plant. As the practice of smoking spread rapidly across the continent, so did the misapplied Arawak word.

From Spanish, the term entered English and other European languages, forever cementing the name of the pipe as the name of the plant. So while the plant’s scientific name, *Nicotiana*, honors French diplomat Jean Nicot, its common name is a direct, if slightly confused, linguistic descendant of the Arawak word for a smoking tube.