Despite its simple spelling, mug can have a variety of meanings. It first appeared in 1400 as a unit of measurement for salt, and then resurfaced in Scottish dialects a century later with the definition of “earthenware bowl”. The modern meaning of “drinking vessel” came about in the 1560s, likely influenced by similar Scandinavian words. Additionally, mug is colloquially used to refer to a person’s “face”, stemming from the “cup” meaning due to a trend in seventeenth-century England where drinking mugs were crafted in the likeness of grotesque faces. This led to the creation of the verb to mug in the early 1800s, originally meaning “to strike someone on the face”, which evolved to encompass a broader definition of “attack” in the 1840s and “attack by robbing” in the 1860s. The term mug was also adopted in the 1870s to describe police records containing images of individuals’ faces, while mug-shot was coined in the 1950s. All this history from a simple measurement of salt!
