Gin

How to spell gin

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce gin

What does gin mean?

1. nounA clear distilled alcoholic spirit flavoured with juniper berries.
2. nounA machine for separating cotton fibres from their seeds.

Gin in a sentence

• She mixed a measure of gin with tonic and a slice of lime.

• The cotton gin transformed the economics of the southern plantations.

• The bar stocked four craft gin brands from local distilleries.

• Workers fed raw bolls into the gin to strip out the seeds.

Where does gin come from?

Language of origin: Dutch

The drink sense of gin is a clipped form of the Dutch word genever (also spelled jenever), the name of a juniper-flavoured spirit, and that Dutch word descends from the Latin juniperus, meaning the juniper tree whose berries give the liquor its distinctive taste. English soldiers fighting in the Low Countries during the seventeenth century brought the drink and its name home, where the long Dutch word was promptly trimmed to the snappy single syllable 'gin' by the early 1700s. The spirit became notoriously cheap and popular in London, fuelling the 'Gin Craze' of that era. A quite separate sense, the cotton gin and the trapping snare, is unrelated in origin: it is a worn-down form of 'engine', from the Latin ingenium meaning 'cleverness' or 'device'. So one tiny word carries two completely different ancestries, which is why a 'gin' can be both a glass of liquor and a mechanical contraption.

How the word is built

• gin (shortened from Dutch genever 'juniper', itself from Latin juniperus)