cocktail
Pluralcocktails
Verbcocktails, cocktailing, cocktailed
Pluralcocktails
Formscocktails, cocktailing, cocktailed
- 1An alcoholic drink made by combining spirits with juices, flavorings, or other beverages.
The bartender shook a cocktail of gin, lime, and bitters.
Guests sipped cocktails on the terrace before dinner.
Note
The word reached the glass by a route nobody has traced. Cock plus tail first pictured a horse whose tail stood up like a cock's. One theory links the drink to gingering, a stimulant, which would make it a stimulating drink, like a pick-me-up. In 1806 the Balance and Columbian Repository described it as spirits, sugar, water and bitters, 'vulgarly called bittered sling', and praised it as an electioneering potion.
- 2A mixture or combination of various different substances or things.
Doctors prescribed a cocktail of antiviral medications.
Stress and poor sleep formed a dangerous cocktail for his health.
Similarmixture, medley, jumble, mishmash, hodgepodge
Note
The figurative mixture is almost always built as 'a cocktail of' something: pollutants in a river, illegal drugs, the nitrogen oxides and particulates of motor exhaust. Like the drink, it suggests several ingredients taken in a single dose. It leans toward the worrying, so writers reach for it when the combination is the danger rather than any one part.
- 3To adulterate a fuel or similar product by mixing in other substances.
Dishonest traders cocktail the fuel with solvents before selling it.
Inspectors found that the supplier had cocktailed the kerosene with cheaper oils.
Similaradulterate, dilute, doctor, cut, contaminate
- 4
- 5A rove beetle, named for its habit of raising its tail end.
The gardener spotted a cocktail darting across the compost heap.
Several cocktails emerged when she lifted the decaying bark.
- 6A horse that is not fully purebred, carrying only an eighth or a sixteenth part of impure blood.
The trainer favored the cocktail for its stamina over short distances.
Breeders rarely paid top prices for cocktails at the country fairs.
Note
The horse sense stands closest to the word's origin: cock plus tail, for a horse whose tail stood up like a cock's. In breeding talk it marked a fine distinction, a horse nearly but not quite pure, with one-eighth or one-sixteenth outside blood. Charles Darwin writes it cock-tail, hyphenated, in The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication (1868). How the name passed to the mixed drink is unknown.
Less common meanings
- 7A mean-spirited, half-hearted man.
It was in the second affair that poor little Barney showed he was a cocktail.
1854, Arthur Pendennis [pseudonym; William Makepeace Thackeray], The Newcomes: Memoirs of a Most Respectable FamilySimilarcoward
Note
Dated British slang that passes judgment on a man's conduct rather than describing his looks. In Thackeray's The Newcomes (1854), poor little Barney "showed he was a cocktail" by how he behaved in an affair, so the word works best as a verdict after the fact. Its plain equivalent is coward, the safer choice today. Used now, cocktail in this sense reads as deliberate period color.
- 8Showily rude; flaunting a deliberate lack of good manners.
It looks very cocktail to be seen riding through the streets of London in a scarlet coat ;
1830, Sporting MagazineShe always goes about with a brace of loaded revolvers in her belt!! Very cocktail and no occasion for it
2008, Christine Kelly, Mrs Duberly's War: Journal and Letters from the CrimeaNote
An adjective from the hunting field and the coach box. It appears in The Sporting Magazine of 1830 and 1840 and in Reynardson's 'Down the Road' (1875), where it is paired with 'muffish'. It usually follows 'looks' or 'looking', often with 'very', because it judged how a display struck onlookers. The sense is obsolete, so use it only in period pastiche.
It looks very cocktail to ride through town in a scarlet coat.
The farmers thought it a very cocktail looking whip.
Showing meanings only.
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Origin
Recorded from the early 17th century, from "cock" (a male bird) plus "tail", originally describing a horse with its tail standing up like a cock's. How this extended to mean an alcoholic mixed drink is unknown; one theory links it to a stimulant or "pick-me-up" drink, while another connects it to "cock-tailed" non-thoroughbred racehorses with docked tails, possibly leading to the term being used for an adulterated spirit.