When was the word cocktail first used for a drink?

The earliest known printed use is 20 March 1798, in London's Morning Post and Gazetteer, where it appears as cock-tail with the gloss vulgarly called ginger. The first American mention is 28 April 1803 in The Farmer's Cabinet, and the first published definition is 13 May 1806.

Is the coquetier egg cup story true?

There is no evidence for it and the arithmetic rules it out. Peychaud's Bitters were created between 1849 and 1857, decades after the word had already been printed in London in 1798 and defined in New York in 1806. Wikipedia files the story among the folk etymologies.

What was in the original 1806 cocktail?

Spirits of any kind, sugar, water and bitters. Harry Croswell printed that definition in The Balance and Columbian Repository on 13 May 1806 and added that the drink was vulgarly called bittered sling. The same four ingredients survive today as the Old Fashioned.

Feaguing, known in later centuries as gingering, was the practice of inserting ginger, onion, pepper or tobacco under a horse's tail so the animal carried the tail high and looked younger and livelier than it was. Nearly all US horse show organisations now forbid it.

Why Are Cocktails Called Cocktails? The Answer Is a Horse

Q: Why are cocktails called cocktails?

Because cocktail was a horse word before it was a drink word. A cock-tail was a horse with a docked tail, and drinks historian David Wondrich argues the drink took its name from feaguing, the horse-market practice of putting ginger under a horse's tail so the animal carried it high and looked lively.

Fifty-one years separate the first printed use of “cocktail” as a drink from the earliest possible date for the New Orleans product at the centre of the story most people get told about the word. Peychaud’s Bitters were created between 1849 and 1857. The word was already in a London newspaper in 1798.

The answer that does work has nothing to do with bars. It comes from a horse market, and from something people did to horses that most drinkers would rather not picture.

Why are cocktails called cocktails?

Because “cocktail” was a horse word first. A cock-tail was a horse with a docked tail, and drinks historian David Wondrich argues the drink borrowed the name from feaguing, the practice of putting ginger under a horse’s tail so the animal cocked its tail up. The drink is named for what it was meant to do to you.

Feaguing was real, and it was a sales trick

By 1796 a “cock-tail” was a horse with a docked tail, and John Ayto derives the drink from there, because the word went on to mean a horse of mixed rather than thoroughbred pedigree. The derivation etymologist Anatoly Liberman endorses is stated on Wikipedia’s cocktail page like this: “It was customary to dock the tails of horses that were not thoroughbred […] They were called cocktailed horses, later simply cocktails.”

Alongside that came the trick. Gingering, historically called feaguing, meant inserting a piece of ginger, onion, pepper or tobacco under a horse’s tail so the animal carried it high and looked younger and livelier than it really was. Francis Grose’s 1796 dictionary of slang reported that a live eel was formerly used, a claim the same source calls very unlikely.

This was fraud at the point of sale, performed on an animal, timed to hold up for the length of a transaction. Nearly all US horse show organisations now forbid it and can disqualify a horse that has been treated this way. Dressing goods up to survive a sale is an old habit, and the ridges around the edge of a coin exist because of a different version of it.

A London newspaper printed the giveaway in 1798

The earliest known use of “cock-tail” for a drink is 20 March 1798, in London’s Morning Post and Gazetteer, in an item running drinks against the name of Mr Pitt. The line ends: “cock-tail (vulgarly called ginger)”.

A London paper in 1798 put the word ginger in brackets next to the word cocktail, eight years before anyone in America bothered to define it. That bracket is the closest thing this question has to a confession.

Wondrich, who holds a PhD in comparative literature from New York University and spent nine years leading the Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails, reads the gloss as decisive. His version of the horse practice is that the animal would “cock its tail up and be frisky”, and his version of the drink is something that cocks up your tail. Ginger did it to a horse. A morning brandy did it to a politician.

The first definition came from a man Hamilton had defended

The first published definition ran on 13 May 1806 in The Balance and Columbian Repository, a newspaper in Hudson, New York, after a reader wrote in asking what the editor had meant the previous week. Harry Croswell answered that a cock-tail is a stimulating liquor, composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water, and bitters, vulgarly called bittered sling, and an excellent electioneering potion, because it “renders the heart stout and bold, at the same time that it fuddles the head.”

Croswell knew what print could cost him. Two years earlier Alexander Hamilton had argued his defence in a seditious libel case, and the fallout changed New York law in 1805 to accept truth as a defence when published with good motives.

A first definition is not a first drink, and the 1798 and 1803 citations both sit in front of it. Arguments about the first of anything turn on what you accept as evidence, which is exactly the trouble with naming the earliest video game.

Those four ingredients never left. Order an Old Fashioned and you are ordering the 1806 definition under a name that first reached print in 1880, when drinkers began asking for something simpler than the bar had become.

The New Orleans egg cup story fails on dates

The popular version goes like this: Antoine Amedee Peychaud, a New Orleans apothecary, served brandy and bitters in a French egg cup, a coquetier, and English speakers slurred the word into “cocktail”. Dale DeGroff is the modern name attached to it. Wikipedia files it with the folk etymologies, which it says can be dismissed “given the well-attested term ‘cock-tail’ for a horse”.

The calendar finishes the job. Peychaud’s bitters could not have existed before 1849. By that year the word had been in print in London for fifty-one years, defined in a New York newspaper for forty-three, and recorded in The Farmer’s Cabinet on 28 April 1803, where a writer noted drinking a glass of cocktail at 11 a.m. and judged it “excellent for the head”. Dates do the same work on let them eat cake: Rousseau recalled a “great princess” giving the brioche answer while he was a tutor in Lyon in 1740-1741, some fifteen years before Marie Antoinette was born.

Ranking the stories by what actually backs them

Story	Earliest hard evidence for it
Docked-tail horse	”Cock-tail” used of a horse by 1796, before any drink use
Ginger under the tail	The 1798 newspaper gloss “vulgarly called ginger”
New Orleans egg cup	Peychaud’s Bitters, 1849 at the very earliest

The usual answer to this question is a list rather than a verdict. One roundup runs six theories plus Betsy Flanagan’s feathers - an Aztec princess named Xochitl, the French egg cup, a Spanish cola de gallo, the cock-tailings drained from a cask, cock ale - then calls the docked horse the most plausible and signs off with “we don’t know”. Names drift away from their origins fast, which is how a plate of fries ended up blamed on the wrong country.

The word has been carrying its own instructions the whole time. A cocktail was a stimulating liquor, taken at eleven in the morning, excellent for the head, and named for a trick that made a tired animal look lively on the way to being sold. Strictly FYI.