cola
Pluralcolas
- 1A carbonated soft drink flavored with kola nut and caramel, usually sweet and dark in color.
He poured himself a tall glass of cola over ice.
Most fast-food chains stock at least one brand of cola.
Note
A brand carried this word around the world: Coca-Cola made cola widely known and fixed the c spelling that now names the whole category, whoever bottles it. Treat it as a mass noun for the drink itself (a glass of cola) and as a count noun for a serving or a brand (two colas). The word's African roots belong to the kola tree.
- 2A tropical African tree of the genus Cola, valued for its caffeine-rich nuts, or one of those nuts.
Traders once carried cola across the Sahara to sell in distant markets.
Each cola contains natural caffeine that gives a mild energy boost.
Note
Behind the word is the tree's own name, borrowed from a Niger-Congo language; Temne and Mandinka both say kola. That older k spelling survives beside cola in kola nut and kola plant, while botanists write the genus as Cola. The noun is countable for a single nut (each cola) and uncountable for the plant or its nuts as a commodity (traders carried cola).
- 3A dense cluster of flower buds growing along the stem of a cannabis plant.
Experienced growers prune the lower branches so the main cola grows larger.
By late fall the colas had swollen with dense, sticky flowers.
Note
A grower's word taken unchanged from Spanish, where cola means "tail." It goes back through Vulgar Latin coda to Latin cauda, which makes it a cousin of queue and coda and no relation to the soft drink that shares its spelling. The plural is colas, and growers speak of the main cola when they mean the largest cluster on a plant.
Less common meaning
- 4Plural of colon, dated. Used mainly in rhetoric and prosody for a clause or unit of verse; the usual plural is colons.
Classical rhetoricians composed their periods from carefully balanced cola.
In this part, the author presents a prosodic hierarchy describing syllables, moras, feet, cola and a typology for words and stress.
2008, Alexandre Allauzen, Review of “Mathematical Linguistics” by Andras KornaiNote
A classical plural that suits the scholar's colon, the rhetorical clause or measured line of an ancient text, far better than the punctuation mark or the bowel. It now reads as dated, and colons has largely taken its place. Where it survives, it keeps technical company, as in Alexandre Allauzen's 2008 run of syllables, moras, feet and cola. It shares only a spelling with the soft drink.
Practice
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Origins
This comes from a Niger-Congo language, comparable to Temne "kola" and Mandinka "kola." The beverage "Coca-Cola" made the term widely known and popularized the spelling with a "c" instead of a "k."
An unadapted borrowing from Spanish "cola" ("tail"), from Vulgar Latin "coda," from Latin "cauda," or from its diminutive "caudula." It is a doublet of "queue" and "coda."