Why Are Cocktails Called Cocktails?

The word “cocktail” sounds strange for a drink. Roosters, tails, mixed beverages, how do they connect? Despite dozens of colorful legends floating around bars and blogs, one theory stands above the rest with solid historical backing. Here’s the real story, stripped of the folklore.

The Official Birth of the Word (1806)

The first documented definition of “cocktail” as a drink appears on May 13, 1806, in a New York newspaper called the Balance and Columbian Repository. An editor responded to a reader’s question with this: “a stimulating liquor composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water, and bitters.”

That’s it. Spirit, sugar, water, bitters. What we’d recognize today as an Old Fashioned.

The key detail: the word “cocktail” already existed in English before this. It wasn’t invented for the drink. It was borrowed from another context entirely, and that context involved horses.

The Most Credible Theory: Horses, Not Roosters

Cocktail historian David Wondrich dug through archives and traced the word back to its equestrian roots. The connection isn’t about roosters at all. It’s about racehorses, mixed breeds, and a practice that sounds bizarre to modern ears.

The Docked Tail Connection

In the 18th and early 19th centuries, a “cock-tailed” horse was one with a docked tail—a tail that had been cut short so it stood upright, resembling a rooster’s tail. This was common practice for working horses and carriage horses to prevent tails from tangling in harnesses.

Here’s where it gets interesting: “cocktail” became slang for horses of mixed breeding, non-thoroughbreds. A cocktail horse wasn’t a purebred. It was a blend, an amalgamation, something “adulterated” compared to the aristocratic thoroughbreds.

The linguistic leap to drinks is natural. A cocktail drink was a mixed drink, blended from different components rather than a straight, pure spirit. It carried the same implication: something combined, not singular.

The Ginger Kick

There’s a second layer to this theory that ties it even tighter. Unscrupulous horse traders in the 18th century had a trick: they’d stick ginger or pepper up a horse’s rear end to make the animal perk up, raise its tail, and appear more spirited to potential buyers. A horse with its tail “cocked” looked lively and energetic.

Early mixed drinks called cocktails were also meant to be stimulating, often consumed in the morning as pick-me-ups. Before bitters became the standard ingredient, these drinks included ginger as a key component for that same kick of energy. The parallel is hard to ignore: both the horse trick and the drink relied on a jolt to the system.

By the time bitters replaced ginger in the early 1800s, the name had already stuck. The drink kept the energy, lost the ginger, and gained respectability.

Other Theories (And Why They’re Less Convincing)

Plenty of other origin stories float around. Most sound better than they hold up under scrutiny.

The French coquetier theory claims that Antoine Peychaud, a New Orleans apothecary, served brandy and bitters in an eggcup (coquetier in French), which English speakers mispronounced as “cocktail.” It’s charming, but the timeline doesn’t work. The word appears in American print before Peychaud’s era of prominence.

Cock tailings suggests tavern owners mixed the dregs from nearly empty barrels and sold them cheap as “cocktailings,” later shortened. Plausible in spirit (pun intended), but there’s zero documentary evidence for this usage.

Rooster feather garnishes proposes that bartenders stuck colorful rooster tail feathers into drinks as decoration, inspiring the name. This is purely decorative speculation with no historical backing.

Princess Xochitl is a romantic Mexican legend involving an Aztec princess serving drinks to American soldiers who mistook her name for the beverage. It’s folklore, not history. No credible sources support it.

These stories persist because they’re fun to tell. But they don’t hold up against the linguistic and historical evidence Wondrich and others have compiled.

How Cocktails Evolved Beyond the Original Definition

In 1806, “cocktail” referred to one specific drink formula: spirit, sugar, water, bitters. That was the cocktail. Everything else had different names—slings, toddies, juleps, punches.

By the mid-1800s, the term started expanding. Jerry Thomas’s 1862 “Bartender’s Guide” helped cement this shift, documenting dozens of recipes under various categories but using “cocktail” more broadly. Bartenders experimented with new ingredients—citrus, liqueurs, vermouths, fresh herbs—and the boundaries blurred.

Today, “cocktail” is an umbrella term for any intentionally crafted mixed drink that balances multiple ingredients. A Margarita, a Martini, a Daiquiri—they’re all cocktails, even though none of them match that 1806 formula.

The evolution reflects what the word always meant: something mixed, something blended, something more than the sum of its parts.

Why This Matters Now

Understanding where “cocktail” comes from isn’t just trivia. It speaks to what makes a cocktail different from a simple mixed drink like rum and Coke or vodka soda. A cocktail implies craft, balance, and intention. It’s not just two things poured together. It’s a composition.

The “mixed” origin also captures the spirit of cocktail culture itself: blending traditions, experimenting with flavors, borrowing techniques from different eras and places. A cocktail, like a cocktail horse, is proudly hybrid. It doesn’t apologize for being a blend. It celebrates it.

So the next time you order a Negroni or shake up a Whiskey Sour, remember: you’re drinking something that shares its name with scrappy, mixed-breed horses and the unscrupulous tricks that made them seem livelier than they were. It’s a fitting legacy for a drink that’s always been about transformation—taking separate ingredients and turning them into something better than any one alone.