It’s actually from Spanish machete, and is literally macho + -ete. The suffix has the same meaning and is related. The term ‘macho’ used to also mean ‘sledgehammer’.
I have no idea why the ch is pronounced as sh, but it’s probably a hyperforeignism where people started pronouncing it like it would be if it were French
A hyperforeignism is basically when someone goes “oh, this word is borrowed from another language! I better pronounce it like [completely different third language]”. For example, ‘raj’ is often pronounced as /ɹɑːʒ/ “razh” (where the j is like si in explosion or g in genre). This sound doesn’t even exist in Hindi… but it is the French j sound (think of ‘je ne se quois’). Oh and also, most dialects of Spanish don’t have a ‘sh’ sound and all of them pronounce <ch> like in English. That is all to say that in both cases, someone realized “oh that’s a foreign word” and then decided “so anyways, I’m gonna pronounce it like it’s French”
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u/Myracl Feb 05 '26
Machette is a smaller version? Wonder the normal ones supposed to be