Definition of "cocktail"

[...] a certain candidate has placed in his account of Loss and Gain, the following items:-- LOSS [...] 411 glasses bitters[,] 25 do. cock-tail

1806 May 6, “Rum! Rum! Rum!”, in Balance and Columbian Repository‎, volume v, number 18, New York: Hudson, page 142

Cock tail, then, is a stimulating liquor, composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water, and bitters — it is vulgarly called bittered sling, and is supposed to be an excellent electioneering potion, inasmuch as it renders the heart stout and bold, at the same time that it fuddles the head.

1806 May 13, “Communication”, in Balance and Columbian Repository‎, volume v, number 19, New York: Hudson, page 146

Deane opened the fray by declaring, à propos of dinners, that the only proper way to create a cocktail of the genus Martini was to add a half-spoonful of sherry after the other ingredients had been satisfactorily mixed, if at all.

1904, Charlotte Bryson Taylor, “Chapter VI”, in In the Dwellings of the Wilderness

He moved majestically down to mix the cocktails. As he chipped ice, as he squeezed oranges, as he collected vast stores of bottles, glasses, and spoons at the sink in the pantry, he felt as authoritative as the bartender at Healey Hanson's saloon.

1922, Sinclair Lewis, “Chapter 8”, in Babbitt

The cocktail in Britain is a rigidly-defined social institution: each has its own particular meaning—the G & T is the alcoholic equivalent of the interview suit; Pernod and black is an alternative to glue sniffing for repentant trendies, etc.

2011, Mark Polonsky et al., USSR: From an Original Idea by Karl Marx, page 32

Motor vehicles, for example, emit a cocktail of nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, volatile organic compounds, particulates, heavy metals and (for diesel) sulphur dioxide.

2013, Andrew Farmer, Managing Environmental Pollution, Routledge, page 22

This chapter examines how the concurrent phenomena of an assertive monarch, persistent civil war, and economic change affected the political activities of townspeople in three ways: in the relationship between the ‘urban sector’ and the English polity, in the complexion of municipal internal politics, and in the nature of urban participation in the civil wars of 1469–71. In all three of these fields, the particular cocktail of circumstances present in the 1460s encouraged a wide variety of townspeople to become invested emotionally and materially in the course of national politics, as they had not been during much of the 1450s.

2019, Eliza Hartrich, “Edward IV, the Earl of Warwick, and a Changing Urban Sector, 1461–71”, in Politics and the Urban Sector in Fifteenth-Century England, 1413–1471, Oxford University Press, page 181

Terry Gourvish, the lead author if the authorised commercial history of BR, described the new BTC structure thus: "The conclusion must be that the combination of a few undynamic railwaymen, underpaid full-timers (Commission and General Staff) and poorly-paid part-time businessmen was not a very potent managerial cocktail."

2023 March 8, David Clough, “The long road that led to Beeching”, in RAIL, page 38

A “cock-tail” is a horse not purely bred, but with only one-eighth or one-sixteenth impure blood in his veins

1868, Charles Darwin, The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, volume ii, John Murray, page 11

It was in the second affair that poor little Barney showed he was a cocktail.

1854, Arthur Pendennis [pseudonym; William Makepeace Thackeray], The Newcomes: Memoirs of a Most Respectable Family, volumes (please specify |volume=I or II), London: Bradbury and Evans, […]

It looks very cocktail to be seen riding through the streets of London in a scarlet coat ;

1830, Sporting Magazine

The Prince had nothing particular about him but a monstrous smart whip with a gold stag for a handle, which was pronounced a very cocktail looking instrument by the Leicestershire farmers, with whom His Serene Highness is no favorite

1840, The Sporting magazine

She always goes about with a brace of loaded revolvers in her belt!! Very cocktail and no occasion for it

2008, Christine Kelly, Mrs Duberly's War: Journal and Letters from the Crimea, 1854-6