People take their coffee seriously. For many it’s a highlight (or several) of the day, and woe betide anyone who serves them an inferior cup. Fussiness over the taste of coffee is matched by fussiness over its terminology – though the fussers aren’t necessarily the same people. Ask for an expresso in public and you’ll put frowns on the faces of perfect strangers. Some will judge you, silently or otherwise, for not saying espresso with an ‘s’ instead. But should you? And why are both words used?
Espresso comes from Italian caffé espresso, and means ‘pressed out’ – the coffee is made by pushing pressurised water through the beans. But because it’s so similar to English express, which often refers to a rapid service (express train, express delivery, express lane), there’s a common belief that it has to do with speed – an espresso as a quick coffee on the go. So the ‘x’ infiltrates the spelling and pronunciation of espresso, leading to expresso.
Another reason for the popularity of expresso is that it looks and sounds more like an English word than espresso does – albeit an imported one, with that ‘o’ at the end. Aside from esprit, another Romance-language borrowing, espresso is the only word in common use in English that begins with espr-, whereas expr- is very familiar from words like express and expression. So people unconcerned with etymology are unlikely to notice anything wrong with expresso. In any case, the two forms overlap when traced back far enough: espresso ultimately derives from Latin exprimere ‘press or squeeze out’.
Usage purists are not happy about expresso being in common use. To them, it’s wrong, end of story, and anyone who uses the word is making a careless linguistic error and a social faux pas. This may seem a reasonable stance. But expresso has been in print since at least 1955 (appearing first in the New York Times, no less), which is almost as long as espresso has been in the language.
Oxford Dictionaries calls expresso ‘incorrect’, but the OED, Merriam-Webster, American Heritage Dictionary, and Macmillan Dictionary all list it neutrally as a variant. Copy-editors and proofreaders will keep the variant spelling’s numbers down somewhat in published texts, but in speech and casual writing you can expect it to hold its own. If expresso continues to establish itself in general usage, it will eventually be accepted as standard by all but the most conservative critics.Email this Post