cup of joe
"cup-of-joe" is a 8-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“cup of joe” is uncommon English (outside the top frequency list), classed as a noun. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency English
- 10
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - A cup of coffee.
Corpus desk
Index EN-cup-of-joe · cup of joe · English
cup of joe · unranked · 0 variants · 0 confusables
- FREQ-UNRANKED Unranked
- LEN-MEGA 10 letters
- VOW-4 4 vowels
- CONFUS-0 No pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-THIN "C" thin
- PHOTO-UNK Peer pending
Read with this headword: Spelling guide for this pattern
Desk codes from Wiktionary headword shape, FrequencyWords rank tier, confusable-pair count, generated misspelling depth, letter-cohort book size, and photo-finish peer. Not a difficulty grade.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | cup of joe |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| Letters | 10 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Long-tail rank of “cup of joe” in English
Rare enough to double-check
cup of joe is uncommon English outside the top frequency list, classed as anoun. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. 2 senses are on record.
cup of joe has no tracked misspelling variants, since its letter sequence doesn't invite the usual edit-distance slips. It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, which typically means the spelling is too distinctive to be mistaken for another word.
Etymologically, the entry records: Uncertain. * Possibly a shortening of "cup of jamoke", from java + mocha: this origin was given in a military officer's manual from 1931, around when the term first appeared. * Alternatively, perhaps a use of joe (“fellow, guy”), signifying that coffee was … The correct English form is cup of joe, spelled C-U-P- -O-F- -J-O-E.
Definition
- 1A cup of coffee.
- 2One’s personal preference.
Recorded use
Wiktionary exampleThese source excerpts show how cup of joe appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
Pike Place is Starbucks' attempt to address complaints that its regular cup of joe is bitter, overroasted and "burnt."
Etymology
Uncertain. * Possibly a shortening of "cup of jamoke", from java + mocha: this origin was given in a military officer's manual from 1931, around when the term first appeared. * Alternatively, perhaps a use of joe (“fellow, guy”), signifying that coffee was the drink of the common man. * Another theory suggests that US soldiers in World War I (1914-1918) referred to a serving of instant coffee made by the G. Washington Coffee Refining Company (founded in 1910) as a "cup of George", and that the common abbreviation of the name "George" ("Geo.") was then read as "Joe". * Another theory derives the term from Josephus Daniels (1862-1948), the Secretary of the U.S. Navy who abolished the officers' wine mess and thus made coffee the strongest drink available on ships. Snopes considers this unlikely because it says there is no attestation of the phrase "cup of joe" until 1930, 16 years after the 1914 order banning the wine mess. Confusingly, some other sources consider the Daniels derivation unlikely for the opposite reason: they say "cup of joe" predates the order.
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.