The routes by which trade, encounters and learning reshaped English.
sherbet (n.)
Collection
Words That Travelled
Sherbet is now a frozen dessert or, in Britain, a fizzy sweet powder. The word is the Turkish şerbet, a drink, from Persian sharbat and Arabic sharba, from the verb shariba, to drink.1
In Arabic, sharba was a single draught, the amount drunk at one time.2
English met the drink in the 1580s and spelled it many ways, among them sorbet, zerbet and cherbet.1
The same Arabic root had reached English long before, by another road. Syrup came in the late fourteenth century through Old French sirop, from Arabic sharāb, a drink or wine.1
The frozen sense arrived through Italian sorbetto in the eighteenth century, and in the nineteenth English took the French sorbet for it again.1
They drank cold sherbet in the shade.