beverage
Pluralbeverages
- 1Any drink meant to be consumed (such as tea, coffee, beer, juice, or a soft drink) usually not counting plain water.
The flight attendant offered each passenger a beverage before takeoff.
The café lists a dozen cold beverages on its summer menu.
Similardrink, refreshment
Note
A borrowing from Old French, built on beivre, "to drink". It goes back to the same Latin bibō that gives English imbibe. It sits most naturally after a classifying adjective: carbonated beverage, alcoholic beverage. Plain water is usually left out today. Yet James Thomson's The Castle of Indolence (1748) could still say of a frugal man that he "knew no Beverage but the flowing Stream."
- 2A small sum of money given as a gift, meant for the recipient to spend on a drink.
The footman expected a few coins as beverage whenever he ran an errand for the household.
He pressed a shilling into the boy's hand as beverage for his trouble.
Note
Money for a drink rather than the drink itself. This is British slang, now archaic, that stretches the ordinary "drink" meaning to the coins that pay for one. It works both as a mass noun (a few coins as beverage) and as a countable one. It suits period writing or the reading of older texts. In present-day English a listener will hear only the drink, so it is best kept out of ordinary speech.
Use it in a sentence
Write your own sentence with beverage, and AI will tell you whether it fits and which meaning you used.
Origin
From Middle English beverage, from Old French beverage (a variant of bevrage), from beivre "to drink" (a variant of boivre), which comes from Latin bibō. It is related to imbibe.