Skip to main content
Glite Dictionary
cafe noir

cafe noir

5.8
A small cup of strong black coffee served without milk or cream
  • noun
  • /ˈkæfeɪ nwɑr/
translation icon : café negro
  • After a long morning, I treat myself to a small cup of cafe noir.

Examples

  • I ordered a cafe noir to enjoy while reading my book.

  • The waiter brought me a cafe noir that was rich in flavor and smoothly bitter.

  • Though my Francophile self thinks a croissant and a café noir "c'est bon,"

    Blog text (20)

Synonyms

coffee
vscafe noir
∞ 1.0

A hot drink made by brewing roasted, ground beans with water

refers to a small strong black serving without milk

Surface Forms

cafe noir singular
cafe noirs plural
café noirs plural
café noir singular

Morphology

cafe + noir

The phrase is a direct composition of 'cafe' (coffee) + 'noir' (black), so its meaning corresponds to 'black coffee' and is directly derivable from the constituents. Although it is a French loanphrase in English, the semantics are compositional and cross-linguistically familiar, so a learner who knows the words would understand it.

Etymology

Cafe noir comes from French: cafe means 'coffee' and noir means 'black'. In old French cafés people drank a small strong coffee without milk, so cafe noir came to mean 'a small cup of strong black coffee'.