cocktail: an alcoholic drink that includes one or more spirits and a mixer such as soda or fruit juice

Mixed drinks called cocktails were being drunk in the United States by the late eighteenth century. One early mention of the word in print comes from an 1806 issue of The Balance and Columbian Repository, a Hudson, New York newspaper. In reply to a reader's query, the editor explains that a cocktail is a mixture of spirits, water, sugar, and bitters. He further remarks that "it is supposed to be an excellent electioneering potion . . . It is said also, to be of great use to a Democratic candidate [a Democratic-Republican opponent of the Federalist party] because a person, having swallowed a glass of it, is ready to swallow anything else." Washington Irving mentions two early American cocktails in his 1809 Knickerbocker's History of New York -- the sherry cobbler and the stone fence. Cobblers were made out of wine, sugar, and fruit juice, while stone fences were a mixture of rum and cider.

The origin of the word cocktail is unknown, but imaginative theories are plentiful. One fanciful but much-quoted story claims that a Revolutionary War-era innkeeper served mixed drinks adorned with a rooster's feather as a kind of swizzle stick. Supposedly, the French soldiers who patronized the inn referred to this flourish as a coq's tail. Another widely held idea derives the word from another French term -- coquetier, 'egg cup'. Reputedly, it was the practice of New Orleans apothecary Antoine Peychaud -- inventor of Peychaud bitters -- to serve customers strong liquors in these tiny cups, presumably for medicinal purposes. Another possibility is that the word comes from cock-ale, a strengthening brew made by steeping a boiled rooster in ale for several days. The word could also plausibly be derived from cock-tailings -- the dregs of liquor barrels, combined and sold cheaply. (The barrel's spigot was called a cock.)

By the midnineteenth century, cocktails had proliferated. According to the Dictionary of Americanisms, published in 1848, popular drinks included such intriguingly-named inventions as tippe na pecco, moral suasion, ne plus ultra, citronella jam, pig and whistle, and switchel-flip. It's hard to believe that cocktails with names like these didn't pack at least as big a punch as a sidecar, daiquiri, or rusty nail.