Tavern

A tavern is a place of business where people gather to drink alcoholic beverages and be served food, and in some cases, where travelers receive lodging. An inn is a tavern which has a license to put up guests as lodgers. The word derives from the Latin taberna and the Greek ταβέρνα/taverna, whose original meaning was a shed or workshop. In the English language the tavern was an establishment which served wine whilst the inn served beer/ale. Over time, the words tavern and inn became interchangeable and synonymous with one another.

Famous quotes containing the word tavern:

“At a tavern hereabouts the hostler greeted our horse as an old acquaintance, though he did not remember the driver.... Every man to his trade. I am not acquainted with a single horse in the world, not even the one that kicked me.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

“Because it is in the nature of things that they become extreme, we have passed down from manliness to cruelty. If I had been told when I was 20 that there was a tavern in the town where the brave and the cruel were gathered together, I would have run all the way and I would have gone up to the largest and leatheriest of the denizens and said: “If you truly love me, kill the bartender.””
—Quentin Crisp (b. 1908)

“Rude poets of the tavern hearth,
squandering your unquoted mirth,
which keeps the ground, and never soars,
while jake retorts, and reuben roars;
tough and screaming, as birch-bark,
goes like bullet to its mark;
while the solid curse and jeer
never balk the waiting ear.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)