The English word "coffee" sits at the end of a long chain of borrowings. The Arabic qahwa — originally a poetic word for wine — came to be used for the new dark drink that 15th-century Yemeni Sufis brewed from roasted beans. Turkish merchants borrowed the word as kahve; Italian traders heard it as caffè; Dutch and English speakers, encountering it through Italian and Turkish at roughly the same time, settled on coffee.
A Drink for Staying Awake
Coffee was first cultivated for drinking in the highlands of Yemen, almost certainly in the 15th century, by Sufi monks who used it to stay awake through long nights of religious devotion. By the early 16th century, qahwa houses were established in Mecca, Cairo, and Damascus. They were the world's first coffee shops, and they alarmed the religious authorities — not because of caffeine, but because they drew men away from the mosque to talk and play chess.
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Why "the Wine of Islam"?
The original Arabic qahwa meant "wine" — a drink forbidden in Islam. When the new beverage from Yemen came on the scene, it took the place wine had held in Arab social life: a stimulant that loosened conversation. Travellers and physicians of the period sometimes called it the "wine of Islam" or the "wine of Araby" — a recognition that coffee was now doing socially what wine did elsewhere, while staying within the religious rules.
Into Europe
The first coffee houses in London opened in the 1650s. They became hubs of news, gossip, business, and politics — Lloyd's of London began as a coffee house, the London Stock Exchange grew out of one, and the satirist Joseph Addison ran an entire newspaper, The Spectator, from London coffee houses. The English borrowed the bean and the word, but they also borrowed the social institution that had grown around them in Cairo and Istanbul.