コーヒー

Dutch koffie is the source form usually given for コーヒー in Japanese historical dictionaries. Nihon Kokugo Daijiten says the word appears often in late early-modern Rangaku texts and traces the wider chain to Arabic gahwah or qahwa. Dutch dictionaries define koffie as the bean, the roasted powder, the drink, and sometimes the plant. The kanji 珈琲 is recorded in the 1862 Ei-Wa Taiyaku Shuchin Jisho. The borrowing belongs to the Edo-period Dutch channel centered on Nagasaki and medical or scientific learning. In the Meiji period, coffee became a commercial drink: the Nihon Kokugo Daijiten notes Senshutei in Tokyo Nihonbashi in 1886 and Kahisakan in Ueno in 1888 as early coffee shops. By the 1900s, カフェー also spread as a related word, while コーヒー stayed as the drink name. Today コーヒー covers the drink, beans, powder, canned coffee, iced coffee, and shop menus. English coffee is semantically close, but the Japanese sound and early written history point to Dutch koffie rather than a direct English loan. Daily menu compounds include ホットコーヒー, アイスコーヒー, and 缶コーヒー. The long vowel in コー and the ヒー ending are part of the Japanese form: ブラックコーヒーを飲む.