Where the word cider comes from

The ancestor of cider is a Semitic word, cognate with Hebrew shekhar, meaning an intoxicating drink — beer, palm wine, or any fermented drink other than grape wine. It entered Greek as sikera in the translation of the Hebrew scriptures, where the phrase conventionally rendered "wine and strong drink" pairs it with the ordinary word for wine.

Latin took it from Greek as sicera, and it passed into the Vulgate in the same paired construction. Throughout this period it is a category word: it denotes what a drink is not — not wine — rather than what it is made from.

This is why the etymology is genuinely interesting rather than merely decorative. The word did not travel with the drink. It travelled with a translation, and then acquired a drink at the far end of its journey.

In the vernacular languages of medieval western Europe the learned Latin sicera was taken up as an ordinary word, becoming Old French sidre or cidre, Spanish sidra, and — borrowed into English from French — sidre, later cyder and cider. As it was adopted it attached to the fermented drink locally in view.

In northern France and northern Spain that drink was fermented apple juice, and by the later medieval period the narrowed sense is established in those languages. English borrowed the word from French with the narrowed sense already largely in place, though early English usage retains traces of the wider biblical meaning.

Semantic narrowing of this kind is common. A general term becomes specific when one member of the category dominates local practice, in the same way that "corn" narrowed to different grains in different English-speaking regions.

English spelling was unsettled until the eighteenth century, and cyder and cider coexisted without distinction of meaning. The seventeenth-century literature uses both, sometimes on the same page. Neither form was more correct, and no technical difference attached to them.

The modern convention that cyder denotes something older, finer or made in a particular way is a marketing usage of the twentieth century onwards, not a historical distinction. A reader encountering it on a label is looking at a choice about presentation rather than at information about the drink.

There is one genuine complication. Because the underlying word once meant strong drink in general, a medieval or early modern text using a form of it does not automatically refer to apple drink, particularly in a religious or legal register where the biblical sense could persist. Context has to settle it.

Perry has a different and simpler history. It descends from a Romance derivative of Latin pirum, pear, coming into English through Old French peré, and it has meant fermented pear juice throughout. Where cider’s word history is a story of narrowing, perry’s is a straightforward derivation from the fruit.

The German-speaking and central European traditions took a third route again, using words built on Most — must, in the sense of pressed juice — for both fermented and unfermented apple and pear drink, with regional qualifiers doing the work of distinguishing them.

These divergent word histories help explain a persistent modern confusion. English cider and American cider differ in meaning because the English word narrowed early to a fermented drink while American usage let it drift back towards the pressed-juice sense, which is a semantic history rather than a mistake.