Martini

How to spell martini

7 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce martini

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does martini mean?

1. nounA cocktail made from gin or vodka mixed with dry vermouth, typically served chilled in a stemmed glass.

Martini in a sentence

• She ordered a dry martini with an olive after the meeting.

• The bartender chilled the glass before pouring the martini.

Where does martini come from?

Language of origin: Italian

Martini is the name of a famous cocktail made from gin or vodka and dry vermouth, but its precise origin is genuinely disputed. The most widely accepted theory traces it to the Italian vermouth firm Martini & Rossi, founded in Turin in the nineteenth century, whose dry vermouth was a key ingredient and lent its name to the drink. A rival story credits the Californian town of Martinez, where a bartender supposedly mixed an early version, the name later smoothing into 'Martini'. Either way the word reached English in the United States in the late 1800s, when the cocktail itself was first recorded. The Italian surname behind the brand ultimately derives from the Latin name Martinus, linked to Mars, the Roman god of war, which is the same root that gives us the name Martin. Because the word is simply a name carried whole into English, the only real spelling trap is the single 't' and single 'n' (it is not 'martinni' or 'marttini'), with the everyday Italian -i ending.

How the word is built

• martini (treated as a single borrowed unit, from the Italian surname/brand name Martini; not analysable into English prefix-root-suffix parts)