عرق

Arabic ʿaraq (عرق) means 'sweat' or 'moisture.' When Arab alchemists developed distillation techniques in the 700s and 800s CE, they noticed that the vapor condensed in droplets on the cooling tubes — the apparatus was sweating. The distilled liquid became ʿaraq, 'the sweat' of the still. Jabir ibn Hayyan (c. 721–815 CE), the father of Arabic alchemy, refined the alembic (al-anbiq) that made this process efficient.

The word and the drink spread wherever Arab and Ottoman trade reached. In the Levant, arak became an anise-flavored grape spirit that turns milky white when mixed with water — a phenomenon called the louche effect. In South and Southeast Asia, the word became arrack and attached itself to spirits distilled from palm sap, rice, or sugarcane. The name was the same; the ingredients changed with the climate.

European colonists encountered arrack across the Indian Ocean. The Dutch East India Company (VOC) traded in Batavian arrack from Java. The British mixed it into punch — the very first cocktail recipes in 1600s London called for arrack, citrus, sugar, water, and spice. The word 'punch' itself likely comes from Hindi panch, meaning five, for the five ingredients. Arak was the base spirit of the world's first mixed drink.

Today arak is the national spirit of Lebanon, the base of Turkish rakı, and the ancestor of Greek ouzo and French pastis. All of these anise-flavored spirits descend from the same Arabic distillation tradition. The word for sweat became the word for fire — the fire in the glass that makes you sweat.