The Italian word cappuccino means "little hood" — a diminutive of cappuccio, a pointed hood. The drink is named, slightly indirectly, after the Capuchin friars (Italian Cappuccini), an austere branch of the Franciscan order founded in the 16th century. Their habit was a brown robe with a distinctive long, pointed hood.
A Drink the Colour of a Robe
When milk is added to strong, dark coffee in the right proportion, the resulting drink takes on the same warm brown colour as a Capuchin habit. Italian speakers in the 19th and 20th centuries seized on the comparison, calling the milky coffee cappuccino — "little Capuchin" — for the colour match. The whipped milk foam on top, paler than the body of the drink, supplied the visual analogue of the hood.
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Earlier German Versions
The same comparison had been made in German-speaking Europe much earlier. Viennese coffee houses in the 18th century served a drink called Kapuziner — a coffee with a small amount of cream, again named for the colour of a Capuchin habit. The Italian version followed in the 19th century, but it was the espresso-based, foam-topped 20th-century cappuccino that crossed the world. The post-war espresso machine, developed in Italy in the 1940s and 1950s, made the modern drink possible by producing the steam needed to whip milk into firm foam.
A Word Cluster of Hoods
The Italian cappuccio is itself a diminutive of cappa ("cape, cloak"), from late Latin cappa. The same root sits inside several other English words: cap, cape, chapel (originally a small enclosure containing the cape of St. Martin), chapeau, chaperone (originally one who wore a chaperone, a kind of hooded cloak). The Capuchin monkey of South America — whose dark cap of fur reminded European naturalists of the friars — is named from the same root.