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tobacco

Spanish chroniclers of the 1530s recorded tabaco as a native Caribbean (Taíno) word, either for a roll of leaves or for a smoking pipe; Spanish also had an older tabaco for medicinal herbs, from Arabic, which may have shaped it. Within a century the habit and the word had circled the globe on Spanish and Portuguese ships, from English tobacco (1580s) to Persian tanbāku, Hindi tambākū, Japanese tabako and Korean dambae.

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The story you may have heard

The extracted draft started tobacco from Arabic ṭubbāq, a sticky medicinal herb (Dittrichia viscosa). Corominas noted that forms like tabaco and atabaca named medicinal herbs in Spain and Italy before 1492, perhaps from that Arabic word. The New World name may have been matched to this older European word, but the TLFi, the OED tradition and Wikipedia take tabaco from Taíno. At most the Arabic word helped shape a native American one, so the Arabic route is unproven.

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1500Taíno

Hops are evenly spaced; labels show the year each form is first attested.