Coffee

How to spell coffee

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce coffee

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does coffee mean?

1. nounA hot drink made from the roasted and ground seeds of the coffee plant.

Coffee in a sentence

• She poured a fresh cup of coffee before the meeting.

• The office kitchen ran out of coffee by mid-morning.

Where does coffee come from?

Language of origin: Arabic

The word coffee traces back to the Arabic word qahwa, which originally referred to a kind of wine and only later came to name the dark drink brewed from roasted beans. From Arabic it passed into Turkish as kahve, and from there into Italian as caffe and into Dutch as koffie during the late 1500s and early 1600s, the era when coffee houses first spread across Europe. English picked it up around 1600, and the spelling settled with a doubled f and a final ee that reflects the drink's busy travels through several languages rather than any native English pattern. The same Arabic root also lies behind the word cafe, the place where the drink is served. Because the doubled f and the ee ending are not predictable from the sound, writers sometimes hesitate over them.

How the word is built

• coffee (single root, from Arabic qahwa via Turkish kahve); no separable prefix or suffix