Literally.
The plant that makes the Hungarian version of the spice was grown from 1529 by the
Turks at
Buda[5] (now part of the capital of Hungary, Budapest). The first recorded use of the word "paprika" in English is from 1896,
[5] although an earlier reference to Turkish paprika was published in 1831.
[6] The word derives from the
Hungarian word
paprika, a
diminutive of the
Serbo-Croatian word
papar (meaning "pepper"),
[7] which in turn came from the Latin
piper or modern Greek
piperi.
[5] Paprika and similar words,
peperke,
piperke, and
paparka, are used in various Slavic languages in the Balkans for bell peppers.
[2]
The word "paprika" entered a large number of languages, in many cases probably via
German.
[8] European languages use a similar word, while examples from other languages include the
Japanese papurika.
[8]
Central European paprika was
hot until the 1920s when a
Szeged breeder found one plant that produced sweet fruit, then grafted it onto other plants.
[4]