When a meteor bashes into the ground, or a bomb goes off and leaves a big hole we commonly call the result a crater. The first time anyone did this in English was in 1613 and the guy who did it was named Samuel Purchas. He wasn’t talking about a meteor or explosion crater though, he was talking about the crater in the top of a volcano. He took this meaning from Latin where as well as the mouth of a volcano, the word crater had meant a bowl or basin.

It took more than 100 years before another meaning for the word crater made it into English, but even though it arrived later, its meaning was more faithful to the original. That latecomer was crater meaning a large bowl for mixing water and wine together.

These days we like our wine as it comes from the bottle, which is usually pretty nearly as it came from the grape, without any water added. But the ancient Greeks would have looked down their noses at such barbarous ways because they felt the correct way to enjoy wine was to pour it into water—never the other way around—in a large mixing bowl. Actually in Greek krater means “mixer” and that’s what they called these vessels. They used to throw drinking parties that lasted all night and some of the mixing bowls they used were simply enormous. In the 1950s near Paris archeologists dug up one of these things that’s now known as the Krater of Vix. It stands more than five feet tall and holds about 250 gallons.

That guy I mentioned who first wrote about volcanic craters Samuel Purchas, he wrote it in one of a series of travel books he authored back there in Shakespeare’s day. The party theme continued when it was over that very book that Samuel Taylor Coleridge fell asleep one night and aided by opium instead of wine dreamed up his famous poem:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree…