The Origin of the Cocktail
The origin of the word 'cocktail' has never been universally agreed. The first use of the printed word 'cocktail' was in Hudson, New York on the 13th May 1806, where it was defined as 'a stimulating liquor, composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water and bitters'.
Over the last two centuries a number of stories have arisen to explain the terms origin.

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The more creditable explanations are:

1.Coquetier is the French name for egg cup, in which a Frenchman is said to have served mixed drinks to his guest. In time they came to ask for his coquiers and the name was corrupted to cocktails.

2. An old French recipe containing mixed wines, called coquetel, was perhaps carried to America by General Lafayette in 1777.

3. One Betsy Flanagan of Virginia is believed to have served a handsome soldier a mixed drink containing all the colours of a cock's tail. He named it 'cock-tail'.

4. The centuries-old expression 'cocked tail' describes a horse or person displaying high spirits. It naturally follows that a beverage seen to raise people's spirits would be called a cocktail.

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Cocktails were a small group of recipes mostly based on the 1806 formula, until the 1880's when cocktail began to develop into a generic term for an ever widening class of mixtures.

The actual root of the term is most likely to have come from a two-word expression, which leaves number 4 the favourite because it alone accounts for the use of 'stimulating' in the original definition.