Soursop has ten names. Here's what your fruit is actually called.

Search for a fruit you ate on holiday and you will often fail, not because the internet lacks the answer but because you are searching the wrong word. Fruits pick up names from every language they travel through, and a few pick up wrong ones from bad translation.

Here are the aliases that cause the most trouble.

Soursop, which has about ten

Soursop is the champion. The same fruit — Annona muricata — is guanábana across Spanish-speaking Latin America, graviola in Brazil, guyabano in the Philippines, corossol in French-speaking regions, sirsak in Indonesia, durian belanda (“Dutch durian”) in Malaysia, mang cầu xiêm in Vietnam and zuurzak in Suriname. English also offers prickly custard apple and Brazilian pawpaw.

Ten names for one fruit means ten separate pools of recipes, none of which find each other. If you are hunting a soursop recipe and coming up short, try guanábana.

Yangmei, sold as something it isn’t

This one is a translation error that has escaped into the wild.

Yangmei — Chinese bayberry, Morella rubra — is sometimes rendered on Chinese product labels and menus as “arbutus”. Arbutus is Arbutus unedo, the Mediterranean strawberry tree: a different fruit, different family, different continent. Shoppers holding a jar and a phone end up researching entirely the wrong plant.

Yangmei’s legitimate names are already numerous — yumberry (a coinage invented to sell the juice abroad), Chinese bayberry, Japanese bayberry, red bayberry, waxberry, Chinese strawberry, yamamomo (山桃, “mountain peach”) in Japanese, and 杨梅 in Chinese. Note also that it is not the northern bayberry whose waxy fruit was boiled for candle wax.

Pawpaw, which means two different fruits

The most consequential mix-up on this list, because both fruits are real and both are called pawpaw by people who are not being careless.

In Australia, New Zealand and parts of the Caribbean and Africa, pawpaw means papaya — the large orange tropical fruit. In North America, pawpaw means Asimina triloba — a temperate fruit that grows wild in the eastern United States, with green skin and custardy flesh tasting of banana and mango.

An American forager and an Australian greengrocer using the same word are discussing plants from different families and different climates. Recipes do not transfer.

Avocado: aguacate or palta

Both are correct Spanish; the border runs through South America. Aguacate is used in Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean and most of South America. Palta is standard in Peru, Chile, Argentina, Bolivia and Uruguay. Portuguese uses abacate, parts of India sell it as butter fruit, and older English called it alligator pear, after the bumpy skin.

The word itself comes from the Nahuatl ahuacatl.

Níspero, which depends where you are standing

Sapodilla travels as chikoo, chiku, sapota, chicozapote, chicle, naseberry, sawo and dilly. It also travels as níspero — and so does something else entirely.

In Spain and much of the Spanish-speaking Mediterranean, níspero means loquat, a small orange spring fruit. In Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela and parts of Central America, níspero means sapodilla, a brown tropical fruit tasting of brown sugar. Same word, unrelated fruits, decided entirely by geography. If a recipe calls for níspero, check where it was written.

Lychee, litchi, lichee, leechee

Not different fruits — different transliterations of 荔枝, lìzhī. Lychee is the usual British and American spelling; litchi is the botanical form and standard in India and South Africa; lichee and leechee turn up on older tins. South Asia often says laichi.

Worth knowing mostly because searching one spelling can miss a lot of what exists under another.

”Custard apple”, the loosest name in fruit

At least four fruits answer to it, which makes it nearly useless without context.

In India and the Philippines it usually means sugar apple or atis (Annona squamosa). In Australia it generally means atemoya, the sugar-apple × cherimoya hybrid. Botanically the name belongs to Annona reticulata, the bullock’s heart. And cherimoya gets sold under it too.

When a recipe says custard apple, the country of origin tells you which fruit it wants.

Star fruit is not star apple. Chinese gooseberry is not a gooseberry.

Two quick ones.

Star fruit (Averrhoa carambola) is ridged and yellow, and the star is the shape of the slice. Star apple (Chrysophyllum cainito) is round and purple, and the star is a pattern inside the cut flesh. Unrelated. The distinction matters beyond pedantry, because star fruit carries a serious kidney-disease warning that star apple does not.

And Chinese gooseberry is simply the old name for the kiwi, which New Zealand exporters renamed kiwifruit in the 1950s. It has never been a gooseberry.

Why this keeps happening

Fruit names attach to trade routes, not taxonomy. A fruit arriving with Portuguese traders gets a Portuguese-shaped name — Thai calls guava farang, the same word it uses for a Westerner. A fruit that needs to sell in a new market gets a new one built for the purpose, which is exactly what “yumberry” is. And a fruit that resembles something familiar inherits its name whether or not they’re related, which is how a kiwi spent decades as a gooseberry.

None of it is going to be tidied up. The practical response is just to collect the aliases for anything you care about — our fruit pages list them under each name, and there’s a companion piece on the pairs people most often confuse.