Why Is Alcohol Called Spirits? Alchemy's Word for What Rises

Chaucer’s Canon’s Yeoman has served an alchemist for seven years and is, by his own account, “never the neer,” no closer to understanding the science. Blowing on the fire has changed the colour of his face, he tells the Host in The Canterbury Tales, which Chaucer wrote between 1387 and 1400.

He does know the vocabulary. After a long jumble of jargon he admits he cannot put in order, he recites what he was taught: “The foure spirites and the bodies sevene, By ordre, as ofte I herde my lord hem nevene,” the four spirits and seven bodies, in order, as he often heard his master name them.

The four spirits are quicksilver, orpiment, sal ammoniac and brimstone, or in modern terms mercury, a yellow arsenic mineral, ammonium chloride and sulfur. None of them is a drink, yet the same word now covers whisky, gin and vodka, and it got there through alchemy.

Why is alcohol called spirits?

Because to medieval alchemists a spirit was a “volatile substance; distillate,” something that rose as vapour when heated, from Latin spiritus, “breath,” and distilled alcohol is collected from exactly that kind of vapour. The alchemical sense is on record from the late 14th century, and by the 1670s the plural spirits alone meant strong alcoholic liquor.

In the alchemist’s furnace, spirits were the things that rose

The yeoman draws the distinction himself, complaining that neither “our spirites ascencioun” nor “our materes that lyen al fixe adoun” can help them.

The Chaucer editor Walter Skeat glossed the pair in his notes to the poem. The ascension of spirits, he wrote, is “the rising of gases or vapours from certain substances,” and the fixed matters are the solids left at the bottom. He listed the four substances that “were technically termed ‘spirits’” as sulfur, sal ammoniac, quicksilver and arsenic, “or (as some said) orpiment.”

A 15th-century treatise gave the essence of wine three names

Wine had been distilled for centuries by the yeoman’s day: Arabic works attributed to al-Kindi and al-Farabi describe it in the ninth and tenth centuries, and Latin recipes for aqua ardens, “burning water,” appear from the twelfth. Alcohol boils at about 78 C, well below water’s 100 C, so the vapour off heated wine is richer in alcohol than the wine itself.

In English, The Book of Quinte Essence, a treatise copied in about 1460-70, tells the reader to “distille this wiyn .7. tymes” for “good brennynge watir.” It says the quintessence drawn from wine “hath .iij. names by the philosophoris”: “brennynge watir,” “the soule in the spirit of wyn” and “watir of lijf.” Frederick Furnivall, editing it in 1866, wrote that the tract “appears to be a great fuss about Alcohol or Spirits of Wine.”

That second name is the nearest the tract comes to the popular claim that spirits are the soul of a drink, and it puts the soul inside the spirit. Watir of lijf is the Latin aqua vitae, which the Online Etymology Dictionary says was applied to intoxicating drinks from the early 14th century. Gaelic uisge beatha, “water of life,” the source of the word whisky, is probably a loan-translation of it.

When Harry Croswell’s newspaper printed the first definition of the cocktail in 1806, the recipe began with “spirits of any kind.” US federal law still lists “spirits of wine” in its definition of distilled spirits.

The word also named a lamp fuel and a builder’s level

Other distillates carried the name too. Augustus Webb of New York coined the name camphene in an 1838 patent for a lamp burning what the American Oil and Gas Historical Society calls distilled spirits of turpentine, a fuel that also figures in the early history of dry cleaning. The spirit level, a name on record from 1768, is “so called for the liquid in the clear tube,” and that liquid is commonly alcohol.

Alcohol began as a black powder for the eyes

In 1615 the English traveller George Sandys, describing Turkish women, wrote that they put between the eyelids and the eye “a certaine blacke powder with a fine long pensil, made of a minerall brought from the kingdome of Fez, and called Alcohole”. That powder is kohl.

The Online Etymology Dictionary traces alcohol to Arabic al-kuhul, kohl, “the fine metallic powder used to darken the eyelids,” by way of Medieval Latin alcohol, “powdered ore of antimony.” Kohl was traditionally made by crushing stibnite, an antimony sulfide mineral.

In English the word meant powder first. A glossary of “straunge wordes” in the 1543 English translation of the Italian surgeon Giovanni da Vigo explains that “barbarous” authors use “alchohol” or “alcofoll” “for moost fyne poudre.” Paracelsus (1493-1541) used it for a fine powder “but also a volatile liquid,” and by the 1670s English applied it to “any sublimated substance, the pure spirit of anything.”

By 1706 a dictionary could state the link outright: the sixth edition of Edward Phillips’s dictionary, revised by John Kersey, says “the highest rectify’d Spirit of Wine is call’d Alcohol Vini.”

The sense “intoxicating ingredient in strong liquor” is attested by 1753, short for alcohol of wine. Before that, the preferred terms were “rectified spirits or brandy.”

Date	Word	What it meant
Late 14th century	spirit	In alchemy, a volatile substance
About 1460-70	spirit of wine	In “the soule in the spirit of wyn”
1543	alchohol, alcofoll	”moost fyne poudre”
1615	Alcohole	A black eye powder
1670s	spirits	Strong alcoholic liquor
1670s	alcohol	”the pure spirit of anything”
1706	Alcohol Vini	The purest spirit of wine
1753	alcohol	The intoxicating ingredient in strong liquor

The al-ghawl story does not match the verse it cites

A 2016 Scientific American blog post said that deriving alcohol from the Arabic al-ghawl is “the most straightforward way to link alcohol and spirits, as the word means spirit,” and that Quran 37:47 uses it “to refer to a demon or spirit that produces intoxication.” Mental Floss repeated the claim in 2021, citing Scientific American. It is a folk etymology: the verse does not support it, and the dictionaries trace alcohol to kohl.

In that verse, all eight English translations that quran.com serves give ghawl as harm, a “bad effect,” a “headache” or “headiness,” and none makes it a spirit or a demon. Wiktionary calls al-ghawl “rather poetical” and adds that “the relation to stibium is well documented.” Even if al-ghawl had given English alcohol, it could not account for spirits, a word from Latin that was alchemy’s term in English by Chaucer’s day.

A second story, which the whisky blog Gentlemen Ranters found in a bartending handbook called BarSmarts Advanced, credits Aristotle with the name, on the idea that the drink invigorates the spirit. No text of Aristotle is cited for it, and he wrote in Greek, centuries before medieval alchemy gave the Latin-derived spirit its distilling sense.

Spirit and alcohol started out in different languages for different things: a Latin word for breath that alchemists gave to the substances rising from their fires, and an Arabic word for the powder that darkened eyelids. Distillation joined them, and by the 18th century the purest spirit of wine was called alcohol. Strictly FYI.