σίκερα

The Hebrew word shēkhār meant strong drink. It appears in the Bible twenty-three times, always as the generic opposite of wine — wine was from grapes, shēkhār was from everything else. Dates, barley, honey, pomegranates. The Septuagint translators in Alexandria, working around 250 BCE, rendered shēkhār into Greek as síkera. The word carried no fruit preference.

Latin borrowed it as sīcera, still meaning any fermented non-grape drink. But northern Europe had apples, not dates. As the word moved through Old French as sidre and into Middle English as sider around the thirteenth century, it narrowed. In Normandy and Brittany, where apple orchards dominated the landscape, cider meant apple drink and nothing else. The Normans brought this specificity to England after 1066.

By the 1300s, English monasteries were producing cider on an industrial scale. The county of Herefordshire became synonymous with the drink. John Evelyn's 1664 treatise Pomona argued that English cider could rival French wine. He was wrong about that, but the orchards thrived anyway. The word had completed its transformation from a biblical term for any intoxicant to a specifically English agricultural product.

In the United States, cider split again. Unfermented apple juice became 'apple cider,' and the fermented version needed the qualifier 'hard.' This American distinction baffles the British, for whom cider is alcoholic by definition. A Hebrew word for strong drink became a Greek loanword, a Latin ecclesiastical term, a Norman specialty, an English county product, and finally an American supermarket label for unfermented juice. The alcohol evaporated from the word itself.