horchata

Borrowed from Spanish horchata, ultimately from Vulgar Latin *hordeata (“(drink, food) made of barley”), from hordeum (“barley”), either via Catalan/Valencian orxata (possibly via a Mozarabic source), or via Italian orzata.

Also cognate to English and French orgeat (“almond syrup”) and Surinamese Dutch orgeade.^[1]

• IPA^(key): /(h)ɔːɹˈt͡ʃɑːtə/

• Audio (Southern England):

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horchata (countable and uncountable, plural horchatas)

1. A sweet beverage variously made with rice, chufa or morro seeds (or, historically, barley), water, sugar, and cinnamon, and sometimes with milk.
   • 2011, Miguel-Angel Galindo, Domingo Ribeiro, Women’s Entrepreneurship and Economics: New Perspectives, Practices, and Policies, Springer Science & Business Media, →ISBN, page 66:

     Manufacturers from the villages surrounding the capital of the region came each day to the city of Valencia with carts pulled by donkeys to sell fresh horchata, tiger nuts and barley water.

   • For more quotations using this term, see Citations:horchata.

• horchata on Wikipedia.Wikipedia
• “horchata”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.

Possibly from Catalan/Valencian orxata (possibly via a Mozarabic source^[1]), from Vulgar Latin *hordeata, from Latin hordeum (“barley”). However, the word was attested relatively late in Catalan as well (17th-18th century), so this is uncertain.^[2] Alternatively, it may be of Italian origin; cf. orzata (“barley water”).

• IPA^(key): /oɾˈt͡ʃata/ [oɾˈt͡ʃa.t̪a]
• Rhymes: -ata
• Syllabification: hor‧cha‧ta

horchata f (plural horchatas)

1. horchata (sweet beverage)

• agua fresca

• “horchata”, in Diccionario de la lengua española [Dictionary of the Spanish Language] (in Spanish), online version 23.8, Royal Spanish Academy [Spanish: Real Academia Española], 10 December 2024
• horchata on the Spanish Wikipedia.Wikipedia ^es