8 Oct /15

Cider

Cider – Word of the day - EVS Translations
Cider – Word of the day – EVS Translations

With cooler weather arriving, many of our minds begin to gravitate towards seasonal food and drink. Typically, this means eating heavier, comforting foods, using more warming spices like cinnamon and nutmeg, and naturally, cider to drink. In much of the world, cider is considered to be a fermented alcoholic beverage, but in most of the United States and Canada, cider also defines an unfiltered apple juice, with “hard cider” being reserved for its alcoholic cousin. Beyond what we call one of our favourite apple-based beverages, what about the word itself?

Originally, our word cider comes from the Hebrew shekhar, though this term only referred to any type of strong drink; further complicating things, Old English uses the word beor to define any alcoholic drink and cider as well. Considering our understanding of the beverage as using apples specifically, our word comes from the late 13th century Old French cidre, which was, itself, a derivative of the Late Latin sicera. As for how the North Americans came to call unfiltered apple juice “cider,” that’s still open for speculation.

Though its popularity has exploded over the last decade, cider has, until recently, been struggling to be noticed at all. Until 2005, cider only accounted for about 2% of the market and was largely thought of as a regional beverage. In the past decade though, a combination of marketing, a trend towards alternative alcoholic beverages, and an expanded product offering has seen ciders surge to 15% of the market, growing almost £100 million in the last year alone.

The first known usage of the word in English comes from 1315, used by William of Shoreham who, in poetry, writes that “neither in cider nor in perry (pear-based cider)” should a person be christened, shunning all but pure water. Imitating Virgil’s Georgics, John Philips, in his 1708 work, Cyder. A Poem., writes that, “My mill now grinds choice apples and the British vats overflow with generous cider.” Finally, William Stanley Jevons, in his 1875 text, Money and the Mechanism of Exchange, discussed an old fashioned method that could be used to motivate modern workers, stating that, “The farm labourer may partially receive payment in cider.”