The Word Coffee Took the Long Way Round

Order a coffee in London, a café in Madrid or a kofe in Moscow and you are using the same word, give or take a few letters. That is no coincidence. All three are the last stops on a long journey that the word made across seas and borders, passed from language to language along with the drink itself.

The journey starts with the Arabic word qahwah. Its original meaning is still debated. Medieval Arabic dictionaries linked it to an old word for wine, perhaps because of the drink's dark colour, and explained it through a verb meaning to have no appetite. Many scholars now think it most likely meant something like the dark one, describing the brew or the bean. Another idea connects the word to Kaffa, a region of Ethiopia that is one of the plant's original homes, though that link is less certain.

From Arabic the word passed into Ottoman Turkish as kahve, and from there it spread west with the drink. In Italy it became caffè. In France it became café. In the Netherlands it became koffie, and English took the word from Dutch. The first English uses appear in the late sixteenth century, and early writers could not agree how to spell it, trying forms such as chaoua, cahve and kahui before coffee finally won.

The drink itself was a sensation. The first coffeehouse in Europe outside the Ottoman lands opened in Venice in the 1640s, and coffee reached England around 1650. Within a few decades there were more than 3,000 coffee houses in England, and coffee had replaced beer as a breakfast drink for many people. Handy new words followed, such as coffee bean, coffee pot and, much later, in 1952, the coffee break.

Russian got the word a little later, in the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century, most likely from Dutch, German or English. Early forms included kofiy and kofey, and that history has left Russian with a famous puzzle. Although the word ends in an e and does not change its form, standard dictionaries treat kofe as masculine, a leftover from those older forms. Many people naturally treat it as neuter instead, and arguments about which is right have become a small national pastime.

Spanish took the French route. Its café was most likely borrowed from French café, rather than straight from Italian, so the Spanish word and the French one are twins, and both of them are grandchildren of Turkish kahve.

We know this route because dictionaries of word origins trace it through written records in each language, from the Arabic sources to the first English spellings and the earliest Russian uses. So every time you ask for a coffee, you are saying a word that has crossed deserts, seas and half a dozen languages, and changed its clothes at almost every stop.