Why Coffee Is Also Known As A 'Cup Of Joe'

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Java-lovers, this one's for you. Today, we're taking a peek into coffee history to get to the bottom of one of the bevy's most commonplace nicknames: "cuppa Joe." Over the years, coffee has been known by other less appealing monikers, from "battery acid" to "embalming fluid." "Mud" and "rocket fuel" are pretty sweet nicknames though, and the former has even inspired a longstanding East Village cafe mainstay (eponymously stylized as "MUD") with an arts-forward beatnik clientele. It's unclear where, exactly, the term "cup of Joe" first originated. What's more clear is when it began to emerge as a popular turn of phrase: Sometime around the 1920s.

Green's Dictionary of Slang dates usage of the word "Joe" in reference to coffee as far back as 1927, accrediting the term to the idiosyncratic slang of the U.S. Navy. An article printed in a local Virginia newspaper from May 1927 reads, "The U.S. Navy has a language or a 'slanguage' all its own. For instance [...] coffee is 'joe.'" This potential origin theory for the term bears linkage to an actual character named Joe. In 1913, Josephus Daniels was appointed Secretary of the Navy by then-President Woodrow Wilson, and in 1914, he enacted General Order 99, officially banning alcohol on military ships. Enter coffee, the next-strongest beverage permitted on ships during World War I. Per the lore, sailors began calling their coffee "cups of Joe" as a disgruntled dig at their superior, although the factual merit of this theory is debated.

Factual linkage to Secretary Daniels aside, the term "cup of Joe" gained especial traction after the 1940s. At World War II's end, soldiers returned from their military tours to states all across the country, new vocabulary in tow. There's even a specific method for making coffee the U.S. Navy way. Still, this "naval base" (pun intended) is far from the only potential origin theory about the term in circulation. Others credit the slang term to railroad train hoppers, and still others posit that "Joe" is a shortened version of "jamoke," a portmanteau of "java" and "mocha" that was also a popular slang term for coffee during the 1930s. Today, Trader Joe's line of store-brand coffees is even playfully called by the mononym "Joe." There was a real Joe behind the Trader Joe's name, for the record, but he isn't the coffee colloquialism guy.

An alternative (and perhaps most plausible) theory posits that java's "Joe" name refers not to one specific person but more broadly to the "average Joe" common man. Coffee is accessible, popular, and widely consumed — an everyman's beverage. A century later, in 2025, a whopping 66% of American adults drink coffee every single day, downing an average of three cups daily, according to recent data from the National Coffee Association. The colloquialism might have evolved organically, and a military connection throughline is also possible under this theory (i.e., "G.I. Joe").

One of the first recorded mentions of the word "Joe" in reference to coffee appears in the 1941 book "Hash House Lingo" by Jack Smiley. The field guide explains soda jerk and short-order cook slang terms from the 1930s (which is also where modern foodies get the term "86" as slang for "getting rid of" something). Smiley's book was a linguistic study of a particular moment in regional and nationwide American history, captured and immortalized, and it cemented the term "Joe" for coffee into the colloquial lexicon of java-lovers across the U.S. — even if they couldn't pinpoint, exactly, where the term came from in the first place.

Although, by the time of its written appearance in Smiley's book, the term was ostensibly already fairly popular and in use. By 1942, the line "Bring Ensign Maxon a cuppa joe" appears in Howard Hunt's novel "East of Farwell," and in 1954, a character in the seminal, eight-time Oscar-winning film "On the Waterfront," starring Marlon Brando, says, "Let's go down get some more joe" (via Green's Dictionary of Slang). Nowadays, "cuppa joe" remains a term that passes through the lips of the coffee lover perhaps as frequently as the actual brew does. But most folks likely aren't pondering the origin of the term before that first cup hits and works its morning magic.