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PlainSpell

horchata

/(h)ɔːɹˈt͡ʃɑːtə/noun

horchata is a noun meaning “A sweet beverage variously made with rice, chufa or morro seeds (or, historically, barley), water, sugar, and cinnamon, and sometimes with milk” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled H-O-R-C-H-A-T-A, and it appears about once in every 12 million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data). The plural of horchata is horchatas.

What does horchata mean?

noun

  1. 1

    A sweet beverage variously made with rice, chufa or morro seeds (or, historically, barley), water, sugar, and cinnamon, and sometimes with milk.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How do you pronounce horchata?

  • /(h)ɔːɹˈt͡ʃɑːtə/

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: LL-Q1860_(eng)-Vealhurl-horchata.wav, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).

Forms of horchata

  • horchatas plural

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How common is horchata?

Horchata appears about once in every 12 million words in written English, the 105,204th most frequent word form in the list.

Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).

Horchata in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese

In the sense sweet beverage:

LanguageWords
Frenchorgeat, orgeade
Spanishhorchata

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Translations are Wiktionary's, by sense; a linked word has its own PlainSpell page.

Where does horchata come from?

Borrowed from Spanish horchata, ultimately from Vulgar Latin *hordeata (“(drink, food) made of barley”), from hordeum (“barley”), either via Catalan/Valencian orxata (possibly via a Mozarabic source), or via Italian orzata. Doublet of orgeat (“almond syrup”) and orzo (“barley-shaped pasta”).

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).