Rums

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. Plural of an alcoholic spirit distilled from sugarcane products such as molasses, often aged in barrels and used in cocktails
2. Varieties of strong liquor distilled from sugarcane juice or molasses, served neat, on ice, or mixed into drinks
3. Distilled alcoholic beverages produced from fermented sugarcane by-products, common in Caribbean and tropical cuisine and cocktails

Etymology: Rum is one of the few major spirits whose name nobody can pin down. It has been in common use in English since at least 1654, but the word's ancestry is unresolved. One long-standing idea is that it shortens "rumbullion" or "rumbustion", names for the drink that were also recorded in the Caribbean in the mid-1600s, when the spirit was first being distilled on the islands. Another links it to "rummer", a large drinking glass, though that connection is uncertain. Some scholars have looked to older English slang: "rome" meant "good" and may share a source with "rom", a Romani word for "man". Others have proposed a link to an old Germanic or Celtic root meaning "strong" or "potent," which might also lie behind "rumfustian" and "ramboozle." Those drinks, however, were not originally made with rum, so that trail is weak. A further suggestion, that the name comes from the last syllable of "saccharum," the Latin word for sugar, is now considered unlikely, since early rum was harsh and hardly suggests a fine, refined origin.

Synonyms: liquor, spirit