Rumfustian

Part of speech: noun, adjective

Definitions

1. A warm beverage made by mixing ale or wine with sugar, spices, and sometimes eggs, traditionally served hot during winter or festive occasions
2. A heated drink prepared from ale or wine combined with sweetening agents and warming spices such as nutmeg or cinnamon, popular in earlier centuries
3. A hot spiced drink made from ale, wine, and other ingredients steeped together, historically consumed as a warming and invigorating refreshment

Etymology: Before it named a drink, "rumfustian" described a noisy, swaggering bully, a sense that seems to have come first. The drink, made by mixing rum with ale or beer, sugar and often eggs, took the name later, probably because it was as heady and boisterous as the man. Both senses are attested in English dictionaries of slang and dialect, but the record doesn't show which came first. The second half of the word is more uncertain. "Fustian" was a coarse cloth, and it also came to mean pompous, inflated language, which may have shaped the word's sense of bluster. The exact route by which "rum" and "fustian" were joined is not documented, so any explanation of the compound remains a plausible guess rather than a settled fact.