When alcohol first entered the English language in the early seventeenth century denoted a kind of cosmetic, specifically an eye liner once used in the Middle East by people such as Cleopatra and Nefertiti.
Francis Bacon, for example, refers to the substance in his 1626 work of natural history called Sylva Sylvarum: “The Turkes have a black Powder, made of a Mineral called Alochole; which with a fine long Pencil they lay under their Eye-lids.”
The powder in question was derived from an ore such as antimony sulfide, stibnite or lead, which Arabic came to be known as called al kohl, meaning the black powder.
Further back, Arabic acquired the word kohl for Hebrew kakhal, meaning to stain or to paint.
The fine powder used by Arabs women to paint their faces in order to increase their beauty.
After the word was introduced to English, it continued to denote a cosmetic eye-powder for at least a century.
Its meaning had broadened to include any fine powder, especially one derived by vaporizing a solid and then allowing the vapor to condense.
By the mid seventeenth century the meaning of the word had extended further, as it came to denote any liquid that is produced via distillation, as a result, the phrase alcohol of wine began to appear at this time as a name for a distilled wine.
Alcohol was first extracted from fermented liquors about AD 800 , by an Arabian chemist.
A physician name Arnoldus de Villa who lived in the south of Europe in thirteenth century was the first suggested the use of alcohol as a medicine.
By the mid eighteenth century alcohol of wine was commonly reduced to just alcohol, and was then applied to any spirit, whether it was distilled from wine, barley, or sugar cane.
The first distilled beverage was brandy, which means literally ‘burnt wine’. Distillation was first practiced in Europe in the Middle Ages, when it was primarily conducted by physician and monks, who intended their beverages to be medicinal.
In the 1890s, the word alcoholic came to denote a person addicted to alcohol, which prompted the slang form alkie in the early 1950s.
Today, alcohol has been further broadened in chemical terminology to designed any compound consisting of a hydrocarbon group joined to a hydroxyl group.
The Word of Alcohol
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