Nobody is sure why a mixed drink is named after a horse's tail
The word cocktail almost certainly began with horses, but which horses is disputed. One theory points to dealers ginger-dosing tired old nags so they would lift their tails and look frisky. Another blames docked tails on half-bred horses, suggesting a diluted drink pretending to be something grander.
The first known non-equine use of the word appeared in a London newspaper in March 1798. In America, a diary entry printed in The Farmer's Cabinet in 1803 records someone downing a glass of cocktail at eleven in the morning to clear the head, then another at the doctor's. In 1806 a Hudson, New York, editor named Harry Croswell gave the first definition of it as an alcoholic drink: spirits, sugar, water and bitters, joking that it was ideal for election campaigns because a drinker would swallow anything afterwards.
The historian David Wondrich favours the ginger explanation, which fits early mentions of a stimulating, almost medicinal drink and explains the bitters. The etymologist Anatoly Liberman instead backs a 1946 theory by Låftman: non-thoroughbred horses had their tails docked, the word spread to vulgar social climbers, and a watered-down spirit raised above its station earned the same label. Theories built on eggcups or cock ale are generally treated as folk etymology.
The first bartender's guide to print cocktail recipes, Jerry Thomas's 1862 How to Mix Drinks, offered ten of them among its punches and cobblers, and bitters were the defining ingredient. That original formula survives in the Old Fashioned, a name customers used for drinks made the traditional way. By the 1890s drinkers had a separate word, highball, for spirit plus mixer. The cocktail party supposedly began in May 1917, when Julius S. Walsh Jr. invited 50 guests to a one-hour noon gathering in St. Louis.
Prohibition, from 1920 to 1933, helped rather than hurt. Illicit liquor was rough, so speakeasies leaned on gin, which needs no ageing, and masked it with honey and juice; sweet drinks also went down fast in case of a raid. Popularity dipped in the late 1960s and 1970s, revived in the 1980s with vodka standing in for gin, and by the mid-2000s the craft of mixology had brought old recipes back with novel ingredients.
Source: Cocktail
