Paprika is a spice made from dried and ground red peppers, Capsicum annuum. It can have varying levels of heat, but the peppers used for hot paprika tend to be milder and have thinner flesh than those used to produce chili powder. The milder, sweet paprika is mostly composed of the fruit of the pepper with most of the seeds removed; whereas some seeds and stalks are retained in the peppers used for hotter paprika.

Paprika, like all capsicum varieties and their derivatives, is descended from wild ancestors from the Amazon River, cultivated in ancient times in South, Central and North America, particularly in central Mexico. The peppers were introduced to Europe via Spain and Portugal in the 16th century. The trade in paprika expanded from the Iberian Peninsula to Africa and Asia and ultimately reached central Europe through the Balkans.

European cuisines in which paprika is a frequent and major ingredient include those of Hungary, Spain and Portugal; it is also found in many French and German dishes. It is widely used in North Africa and the Middle East.

Paprika is a spice made from dried and powdered red peppers. It is traditionally made from Capsicum annuum varietals in the Longum group, including chili peppers. Red peppers grow in the wild in Mexico, where they were being gathered and eaten c.7000 BC, and were cultivated there before 3500 BC. The food writer Alan Davidson comments that Christopher Columbus probably came across them on his first voyage in 1492, and may have brought plants back to Europe. The Spaniards and Portuguese also took them to India and south-east Asia and they were quickly taken up and grown in the Middle East, the Balkans and Europe – to Italy by 1526, Germany by 1543 and known in Hungary by 1569.

Paprika was also taken up in the Ottoman Empire, which for much of the 16th and 17th centuries, ruled the central region of Hungary. The long period of Turkish presence introduced several foodstuffs to the region, including filo pastry (which evolved into the strudel), pilafs, pitta bread and paprika. The plant used to make the Hungarian version of the spice was first grown in 1569. Central European paprika was hot until the 1920s, when a Szeged breeder found a plant that produced sweet fruit, which he grafted onto other plants. According to George Lang in his Cuisine of Hungary (1994), the earliest reference to paprika peppers in a Hungarian dictionary was in 1604, when the name used was Török-bors (Turkish pepper). The name "paprika" did not come into currency in Hungary until 1775, when J. Csapé, in his Herbarium, called it "paprika garden pepper".

The first recorded use of the word paprika in English is from 1830. The Times mentioned "A' borsos levecskét – the pepper soup, or paprika soup, made of the capsicum annuum of Linne ... a favourite dish among the Magyars, Turks, and Servians". In Spices, Salt and Aromatics in the English Kitchen (1970), Elizabeth David notes that in cookery books of the Edwardian era, paprika is sometimes referred to as "Krona pepper".

The word paprika is from Hungarian paprika, a diminutive from Serbo-Croatian papar (pepper), which in turn was derived from the Latin piper or modern Greek piperi. "Paprika" and similar words, including "peperke", "piperke" and "paparka", are used in various languages for peppers.

Paprika can have varying levels of heat, but the chili peppers used for hot paprika tend to be milder and have thinner flesh than those used to produce chili powder. Sweet paprika is mostly composed of the pericarp, with more than half of the seeds removed; hot paprika contains some seeds, stalks, ovules and calyces. Whether paprika is red, orange, or yellow depends on its mix of carotenoids. Yellow-orange shades of paprika derive primarily from α-carotene and β-carotene (provitamin A compounds), zeaxanthin, lutein and β-cryptoxanthin; reds derive from capsanthin and capsorubin. One study found high concentrations of zeaxanthin in orange paprika. The same study found that orange paprika contains much more lutein than red or yellow paprika.