"cup of joe" meaning in English

See cup of joe in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Noun

Audio: en-au-cup of joe.ogg [Australia] Forms: cups of joe [plural]
Etymology: Uncertain. * Possibly a shortening of "cup of jamoke", from java + mocha: this origin was given in a military officer's manual from 1931, around when the term first appeared. * Alternatively, perhaps a use of joe (“fellow, guy”), signifying that coffee was the drink of the common man. * Another theory suggests that US soldiers in World War I (1914-1918) referred to a serving of instant coffee made by the G. Washington Coffee Refining Company (founded in 1910) as a "cup of George", and that the common abbreviation of the name "George" ("Geo.") was then read as "Joe". * Another theory derives the term from Josephus Daniels (1862-1948), the Secretary of the U.S. Navy who abolished the officers' wine mess and thus made coffee the strongest drink available on ships. Snopes considers this unlikely because it says there is no attestation of the phrase "cup of joe" until 1930, 16 years after the 1914 order banning the wine mess. Confusingly, some other sources consider the Daniels derivation unlikely for the opposite reason: they say "cup of joe" predates the order. Etymology templates: {{unc|en}} Uncertain, {{m|en|java}} java, {{m|en|mocha}} mocha, {{m|en|joe||fellow, guy}} joe (“fellow, guy”) Head templates: {{en-noun|cups of joe}} cup of joe (plural cups of joe)
  1. (chiefly US, idiomatic) A cup of coffee. Tags: US, idiomatic Categories (topical): Coffee Synonyms: cup of tea, predilection, cup o' joe, cuppa joe
    Sense id: en-cup_of_joe-en-noun--KavJemJ Disambiguation of Coffee: 92 8 Categories (other): American English, English entries with incorrect language header, English entries with topic categories using raw markup, English terms with non-redundant non-automated sortkeys Disambiguation of English entries with incorrect language header: 63 37 Disambiguation of English entries with topic categories using raw markup: 69 31 Disambiguation of English terms with non-redundant non-automated sortkeys: 69 31
  2. (figurative, idiomatic) One’s personal preference. Tags: figuratively, idiomatic Synonyms (preference): cup of coffee
    Sense id: en-cup_of_joe-en-noun-GZC8FmEm Disambiguation of 'preference': 21 79

Inflected forms

Alternative forms

Download JSON data for cup of joe meaning in English (3.9kB)

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  "etymology_text": "Uncertain.\n* Possibly a shortening of \"cup of jamoke\", from java + mocha: this origin was given in a military officer's manual from 1931, around when the term first appeared.\n* Alternatively, perhaps a use of joe (“fellow, guy”), signifying that coffee was the drink of the common man.\n* Another theory suggests that US soldiers in World War I (1914-1918) referred to a serving of instant coffee made by the G. Washington Coffee Refining Company (founded in 1910) as a \"cup of George\", and that the common abbreviation of the name \"George\" (\"Geo.\") was then read as \"Joe\".\n* Another theory derives the term from Josephus Daniels (1862-1948), the Secretary of the U.S. Navy who abolished the officers' wine mess and thus made coffee the strongest drink available on ships. Snopes considers this unlikely because it says there is no attestation of the phrase \"cup of joe\" until 1930, 16 years after the 1914 order banning the wine mess. Confusingly, some other sources consider the Daniels derivation unlikely for the opposite reason: they say \"cup of joe\" predates the order.",
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    {
      "word": "cuppa joe"
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}

This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-05-15 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-05-02 using wiktextract (8203a16 and 304864d). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.