The words tavern, pub, and bar designate establishments whose primary function is to serve liquor. Of these three words, tavern is by far the oldest; it was adopted at the end of the thirteenth century from French, which had derived it from the Latin taberna, meaning a wooden hut. The Latin taberna also developed the diminutive form tabernaculum, from which English gets the word tabernacle, the name of the tent covering the Ark of the Covenant; the holy tabernacle and the homely tavern are therefore closely related. Bar is the next word that came to mean a drinking place; when bar was adopted from French in the late fourteenth century, it referred only to any long, narrow piece of metal or wood. By the end of the sixteenth century, however, it had also come to signify the long, narrow counter in a tavern separating the customers from the servers, and by the early nineteenth century the name of this counter had also been extended to any establishment furnished with such a “bar.” The word pub developed in the middle of the seventeenth century, but in the previous century the term public house\u2014of which pub is an abbreviation\u2014had been used more generally to refer to a place providing not only liquor but also food and lodging. Finally, there is also the word cabaret, which was adopted from French in the middle of the sixteenth century as a slightly more sophisticated name for drinking establishments; the word, whose ultimate origin is unknown, retained this sense until the early twentieth century when it came to mean a restaurant providing zany entertainment, and then\u2014by extension\u2014the entertainment itself.<\/p>\n
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The words tavern, pub, and bar designate establishments whose primary function is to serve liquor. Of these three words, tavern is by far the oldest; it was adopted at the end of the thirteenth century from French, which had derived it from the Latin taberna, meaning a wooden hut. The Latin taberna also developed the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41238","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-t"],"yoast_head":"\n