Etymology
Alcoholism: ETYMOLOGY
The etymology of Alcohol
This word alcohol is Arabic in origin, and it means the spirits. In fact, the Arabic word spoke of a spirited gift of spirit from the spirits. The belief was that anybody who took too much of al gawl would be possessed by spirits ghuls who would indulge in plenty of mischief and mayhem.
As the drinking of alcohol was prohibited due to religious reasons, this spirit was used only for medicinal and cosmetic purposes. It came into English usage from the French, who still call al-gawl, l’alcool. This is because they were confusing it with another word- al kuhl, which means the kohl, which one uses as a cosmetic to define one's eyes. From there came the word alcohol.
The confusion came about because a very fine powder, which was used as Kohl was made by sublimating stibnite to make antimony sulphide, was defined in medieval alchemy as the product of the spirit of stibnite. It will only in the 12th century, when chemists decided to write treatises on distillation. Let us assume that the art of distilling alcohol was brought to the West from those people who went to the holy land to fight the Crusades. According to them, the Moors called a fine powder al kohl.
The word used here was alcofoll. Since then, Latin writers use the word out home for any product which will obtained by the process of distillation and that included the distillation of fermented products by Brandy, whiskey, rum and wine. Nowadays in chemistry, alcohol means ethanol or “the spirit of wine".