A cocktail is an alcoholic mixed drink that contains two or more ingredients — at least one of the ingredients must be a spirit.

Cocktails were originally a mixture of spirits, sugar, water, and bitters. The word has come to mean almost any mixed drink that contains alcohol. A cocktail today usually contains one or more kinds of spirit and one or more mixers, such as soda or fruit juice. Additional ingredients may be ice, sugar, honey, milk, cream, and various herbs.The origin of the word cocktail is not known.

The earliest known printed use of cocktail is said to be in The Farmer's Cabinet on April 28, 1803

Drank a glass of cocktail—excellent for the head...Call'd at the Doct's. found Burnham—he looked very wise—drank another glass of cocktail.

However, according to the bibliographer Stephen Conrad Stuntz, The Farmer's Cabinet, a semi-monthly magazine published at Philadephia, was not begun until July 1836; the date would be a misprint, perhaps for a date in the 1830s.The earliest definition of cocktail was in the May 13, 1806, edition of The Balance and Columbian Repository, a publication in Hudson, New York, in which an answer was provided to the question, "What is a cocktail?".

Cocktail is a stimulating liquor composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water, and bitters—it is vulgarly called a 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. It is said, also to be of great use to a Democraticcandidate: because a person, having swallowed a glass of it, is ready to swallow anything else.