# Origination of the word carboy



## jdammer (Oct 14, 2010)

Anyone know. After looking at a few google searches all I found was it came from the Persian word garabah but nothing else.

Just curious...


----------



## jet (Oct 14, 2010)

Call me old-fashioned, I checked my Webster's dictionary. It lists the origin as the Arabic word _qarrabah_, and dates it to 1753.


----------



## KSmith3011 (Oct 14, 2010)

The carboy, a glass vessel with a globular base tapering to a narrow neck, was commonly displayed filled with brightly coloured liquids in pharmacy shop windows well into the second half of this century, and has come to be a symbol of pharmacy. The term carboy is a corruption of the Persian word qarabah or qarrabah, meaning “large flagon”, and the carboy is thought to originate from the Near East, where drug sellers used large glass vessels, filled with coloured liquids, especially rosewater and wine, in their stalls. There is some debate over exactly when glass carboys were introduced in Britain, but it is thought to have been sometime in the late 17th or early 18th century. Early examples were usually dark hued glass. By the late 18th century they were recorded by observers as a characteristic and attractive feature of the chemists and druggists shop window, and have retained a strong association with pharmacy ever since.


----------



## JohnT (Oct 15, 2010)

And in persia (modern day Iran/Iraq) it is illegal to drink alcohal. Anyone else see the irony in this?


----------



## myakkagldwngr (Oct 17, 2010)

I would have loved to watch them make a carboy back in the 17th century! 
Back in the Persian days, wine or anything with alcohol in it would have probably been safer to drink than water. But now days, it is more of the alcohol thing than the safety issue, so I guess the fundamentalist frown on it.


----------

