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Comment by vram22 | Hacker News Reader

>started growing my own chilis

I thought / have observed that the spelling "chili" (single letter l) was used for the US / Mexican dish called "chili con carne", and the spelling "chilly/chillies" was used for the hot pepper that came from the Americas and spread to much of the world.

Edit: Wikipedia says both spellings are used for the hot pepper:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chili_pepper

Edit 2: See the Spelling and usage section.

It does not mention the y ending, but I have seen it in India.

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I've never seen or heard of anyone using "chilly" to mean anything other than cold. I'm from Portland, but I've also lived in San Francisco and Tucson.

I think in India it is the commonly used spelling, and maybe in Britain and Australia too. But not sure about the latter two, need to check.

usually "Chilli" in the UK.

A few relevant points made by Govindarajan in this 1985 paper[1]:

> Chilli or Chili, a name now commonly used in Asia and Africa, is said to have come from the Nahautl dialect of Mexico and Central America.

> The U.S. Government Standard divided Capsicum into types corresponding to commercial types; paprika, red pepper, ground and crushed. The term "chilli" is not generally used in the U.S., but is used in Britain, India, Africa, and the countries in the East.

> The British Standard Specifications, however, differentiate between chillies and capsicum, obviously based on the degree of pungency. It gives no values but describes "chillies" as pungent small fruits of certain forms of the species C. frutescens L. and describes Capsicum as of varied sizes, generally big, of the species, C. annuum L.

[1] https://sci-hub.se/10.1080/10408398509527412

Chilli/chillies in the Britain, but chilly/chillies is certainly a more typical looking pair, logic's on your side!

Cool, er, hot! ;)

Interesting! I worked in an Indian food truck - owned by an Indian family - in Tucson, and we had "chili chicken" (with that spelling) on the menu. I wonder if they spelled it differently at some point.

Was it an Indian or Chinese style dish?

In India, chili chicken (probably spelled chilli chicken) is an Indianised-Chinese dry starter or appetizer kind of dish, of small pieces of chicken stir-fried with a tangy dry coating / sauce that includes ginger, garlic and red chillies. You can get vegetarian versions too, like paneer chilli. That coating / sauce is really good. It has tiny solid bits and pieces of ginger and garlic which adds to the taste.

You get it in (Indian) Chinese or multi-cuisine restaurants.

I'm from the UK and live in Australia.

Can confirm I have never seen "Chilly" as a spelling for the pepper in either country!

usually chili or chilli in India, though I've seen chilly used on occasion

Here in the UK we say chilli.

For more fun, in NM they spell it chile, and pronounce it like the country. They're convinced they're right and everyone else is wrong.

Your NM friends have better Spanish than anyone else in this thread.

Meanwhile, my fellow Texans have famously bastardized “chile con carne” to refer to spicy beef stew, and would tend to specify “chili pepper” to refer to the actual fruit itself.

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