In English, both the spellings "mate" and "maté" are used to refer to the plant or beverage, but the latter spelling is incorrect in both Spanish and Portuguese, as it would put the stress on the second syllable, while the word is correctly pronounced with the stress on the first syllable. The addition of the acute accent over the final "e" in the English spelling was likely added as a hypercorrection to indicate that the final "-é" is not silent. Indeed, the word "maté" in Spanish has a completely different meaning; in Spanish: is understood as being the first person past tense conjugation of ("to kill") and means "I killed".