Cocoa, Coffee, Tea, Chocolate

• 1544 The term cacao entered the European vocabulary around the mid-16th century, with a documented mention of cacao beans and a cacao drink being gifted to Philip II of Spain in 1544 by a delegation of Kekchi Mayan people in Mexico.
• 1555 Coco in English (referring to the fruit of the coconut palm) was first recorded in 1555 in a translation by Richard Eden. They were earlier known in English as "Indian" Beans, or "Great" Beans.
  • Borrowed into English from Portuguese and Spanish, so named because the three depressions on the shell resembled a grinning face.
  • 1577-1580. Sir Francis Drake in the West Indies refers to "a kind of fruit called cocos".
  • 1599. Coconut as an individual word has been located by the Merriam Webster Dictionary in 1599.
  • 1625 Coconut Tree The earliest known use of the term "coconut tree" is cited by the Oxford English Dictionary in 1625 in the writings of Dr. Layfield.
• 1579 The term chocolate entered the Spanish language around 1579 with its origin in the Aztec word "xocolatl" (pronounced as "chocolatl" and meaning "bitter water") and was recorded as "chocolate" in English in 1604. The Spanish adapted the indigenous Aztec drink, adding sugar and other flavorings and bringing the word and the beverage to Europe.
• 1652 First coffee shop opens in London "with coffee made from the ground and roasted seeds of a tree originally native to Arabia and Abyssinia" c. 1600, from Dutch koffie, from Turkish kahveh, from Arabic qahwah which Arab etymologists connected with a word meaning "wine," but it is perhaps rather from the Kaffa region of Ethiopia, a home of the plant. Tea (also known as char) was from China. It was known in Paris by 1635, the practice of drinking it was introduced in England by 1644.
• 1670 Jamaica Following the British invasion of Jamaica in 1655 (under Oliver Cromwell) Spain ceded the Colony of Jamaica and the Cayman Islands in the 1670 Treaty of Madrid. Under British rule, the island became a hugely profitable possession, producing large quantities of sugar for export.
• 1689 Sir Hans Sloane a seller of "medications" in London is said to have popularized "drinking chocolate" after his visit to Jamaica in 1687. By the 1750s, a Soho grocer named Nicholas Sanders claimed to be selling Sloane's recipe as a medicinal elixir, perhaps making "Sir Hans Sloane's Milk Chocolate" the first brand-name milk chocolate drink.
• 1707 Cocoa seeds (as a term) was first published in English in Sir Hans Sloane's "A Voyage to the Islands Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers and Jamaica". As a new spelling it confused cocoa with coco and cacao.
• 1755 The printers of Johnson's dictionary ran together the two entries for coco and cacao, after which it has never been undone. Cocoa has been the regular spelling from about 1800.
• 1824 Cadbury Brothers form Cadburys in London, selling tea, coffee, and drinking chocolate.
  • 1842 Cadburys sells chocolate for eating, perhaps the first in Britain.

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