Why the word “mead” shows up in Chinese - by Colin Gorrie
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Why the word “mead” shows up in Chinese<br>Honey words turn out to be rather sticky
Colin Gorrie<br>Jun 24, 2026
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This healing and honeyed draught of mead, deign to accept from me. Set it first to thy lips (1910), Arthur Rackham<br>Didao, State of Qin, 250 BC.<br>Frost still lay on the ground when Heng began his work, but it had melted by mid-morning. By that point, Heng had already cleared the goods of a dozen merchants.<br>He worked at a plank table in a room attached to the rammed-earth wall that surrounded Didao, a town set at the very edge of the world. Any farther west and you’d leave civilization behind. The road out there was no place to test your luck.<br>Why would you leave, anyway, when the barbarians brought everything they made or gathered — or stole, for all Heng knew — into the central states. He didn’t care how the barbarians got their goods. His only job was to tax them once they crossed into Qin.<br>Grain came in, and went straight into the bronze measure. Hemp was counted by the bolt, hides by the bundle. Horses brought down by the Rong barbarians were graded by the teeth. Everything was counted, assessed, and written down.<br>It paid to be quick, but it paid much better to be correct. Everything Heng wrote down was a little wager. If a measure of grain was later found to be wrong, or a horse improperly graded, he would pay for it.<br>Mistakes were paid in armour. A small error would mean Heng owed the state a shield. A larger error would mean a full suit. And a man who could not pay his debt in armour would pay it in hard labour. The granaries were full of men like that.<br>But Heng had never been one of them. He vowed he never would be.<br>Heng was still turning such thoughts over in his mind when the next trader came in around midday, on foot. He led a short string of pack horses and wore sheepskin on his back. Heng counted his wares while the man waited nervously for the assessment.<br>It was mostly the usual fare: wool and raw hides. But this time there was something else: jars. Four of them.<br>“What is in these jars?” he asked slowly, gesturing with his hands.<br>The barbarian answered in surprisingly good Chinese, “This is mit.”<br>“What is mit?” asked Heng.<br>The man began to explain, but Heng cut him off.<br>“Open it,” Heng ordered.<br>The man complied. Once he had loosened the clay stopper with his thumb, the smell hit him first. It was sweet, almost the scent of flowers. Heng picked up the jar and tilted it. The brown liquid inside lurched to the side rather than flowing.<br>Heng took a bronze spoon from his table and scooped out a portion of the liquid. It wasn’t as dark as it seemed in the jar: more golden than brown.<br>“It is sweet,” said the barbarian trader.<br>Heng had never seen this mit before. Perhaps it was some kind of malt syrup, made from a grain they had in the west.<br>“How is it made?” asked Heng.<br>“There is a… fly,” said the trader. This conversation seemed to be testing the limits of the man’s Chinese. “Not a fly. But like a fly. Its tail is sharp. What is the word for this?”<br>Heng realized what he was looking at. “The word is bee,” he told the man.<br>Mit, the substance in the jars, was honey.<br>But Heng had a problem. No statute told him how to tax honey. He’d never even seen the stuff before today — almost no one had but kings.<br>He could just write in “malt syrup” and assess it at the rate for malt syrup. That, at least, was in the statutes. But if anyone ever found out he’d knowingly misassessed something, he’d pay for it, and the price would be more than a suit of armour.<br>The barbarian looked at him, clearly growing nervous himself.<br>Then Heng realized the answer. Mit wasn’t in the statutes. So mit didn’t have to be taxed at all!<br>If the King of Qin had wanted mit taxed, he would have set a tax rate for it. So Heng gave the opened jar back to the trader. No tax was owed on mit.<br>The trader put the stopper back in the jar, gathered up his things, and was led into another chamber where he’d turn over the portion of the goods the statues demanded.<br>Heng turned to the next trader. More skins, more hides, and more small wagers against the statutes. As for today’s wager, only time would tell if it would end up costing him.1
Have you drunk any mead lately?<br>In case you never touch the stuff, mead is an alcoholic beverage made from honey.<br>It has a long history. The word mead is the oldest word for any alcoholic beverage in the English language. It’s the only one we can reconstruct back to the earliest ancestor of English: Proto-Indo-European.2<br>The root that gave us mead has been reconstructed as *médʰu in Proto-Indo-European,3 and it’s one of the stickiest words in the entire Indo-European lexicon.<br>The relatives of mead sit across the entire map of that extremely widespread family. From Old Irish mid ‘mead’ in the northwest to Sanskrit mádhu ‘honey; wine’ in the southeast, words that sound like mead can be found...