The Etymology of Barista
Barista is a recent and revealing English borrowing from Italian. The Italian word is itself a hybrid: bar (an English loan, taken into Italian around 1900 from the Anglo-American drinking-counter sense) plus the Italian agent suffix -ista, the same suffix you find in artista, ottimista, dentista. So a barista is, literally, a bar-person. In Italian the word is gender-neutral and covers all café and bar staff — whether they are pulling espresso, pouring beer, mixing aperitivi, or making toasted sandwiches. English borrowed barista in the mid-1980s, when the second wave of speciality coffee was beginning to take Italian café technique seriously, and narrowed its meaning sharply: in English a barista is a coffee professional, not a bartender. The word entered the wider English lexicon through Starbucks, which adopted it as a job title in the early 1990s and exported it worldwide. The Italian -ista plural is baristi (masculine/mixed) or bariste (feminine); English just adds -s.