Bibliotheca Polyglotta

The word seems to be re-imported into Arabic during lC19 / eC20 from some European language, probably English, after it had been loaned from Ar (al‑) ↗kuḥl into mLat and Span in Andalusia.

hist

No entry in Freytag, Lane, Dozy, Wahrmund, Kazimirski. Cf. also the fact that Bocthor, in his Dictionnaire français–arabe (vol. 1, 1828), still suggests the descriptive rūḥ al-ʕaraq, obviously coined after Fr esprit de vin pur, which is given as the second meaning of alcohol while the first is still ‘poudre très-fin’ (rendered as kuḥl).
lC19? First attestation in Ar still needed.

cogn

…

disc

▪ The word does not seem to be attested in Ar dictionaries before C20 and is therefore with all probability either a direct loan from a European language (Engl Fr alcohol ?) or an Ar creation, inspired by the European word, but made in awareness of the latter’s ultimately Ar etymology. The European words all go back to Ar (al‑) ↗kuḥl ‘(powdered ore of) antimony’ which was loaned into mLat and Span in Andalusia. While the original meaning is still preserved in mLat, the definition has already broadened in Span alcohol to ‘any fine powder produced by sublimation, powdered cosmetic’, and it is with this value that the word first appears in Engl in the 1540s (eC16 as alcofol). It broadened again in the 1670s “to ‘any sublimated substance, the pure spirit of anything’, including liquids.” The “modern sense of ‘intoxicating ingredient in strong liquor’ is first recorded 1753, short for alcohol of wine, which was extended to ‘the intoxicating element in fermented liquors.’ In organic chemistry, the word was extended 1850 to the class of compounds of the same type as this” – etymonline. When Ar kuḥl was replaced with kuḥūl is difficult to tell. In any case, Wiedemann/Allan think that “the more complicated process needed for the production of alcohol was probably introduced into the Islamic world from Europe, where it was first discovered in the 12th century.”
▪ According to Osman2002, the extension of meaning from ‘fine powder’ to ‘spirit of wine’ took place already “bei den arabischen Alchimisten in Spanien”, and the word is first attested in German with this meaning in 1616. From Wiedemann/Allan1980 we would have to infer that the extension had taken place already before lC10 in Andalusia, since “[s]ublimation and the distillation of drugs was known to K̲h̲alaf b. ʕAbbās al-Zahrawī (Abulcasis)”. Kluge2002, however, maintains that German Alkohol, when loaned from Span alcohol, still meant ‘fine powder’, and that it was Paracelsus (eC16) with whom it is first attested, initially as ‘s.th. fine, subtle’, then ‘essence’, as in alcohol vini ‘spirit of wine’, from where it spread and became part of international terminology.

west

deriv

► kuḥūlī alcoholic, spirituous : nsb-adj.

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