whisky: [18] Whisky denotes etymologically ‘water of life’. The word is short for an earlier whiskybae, which was an alteration of usquebaugh; and this in turn was an anglicization of Gaelic uisge beatha ‘water of life’ (Gaelic uisge ‘water’ comes from the same Indo-European source as English water, and beatha ‘life’ is related to Latin vīta ‘life’ and English vital). The distinction in spelling between Scotch whisky and American and Irish whiskey goes back no further than the 19th century. French eau de vie ‘brandy’, literally ‘water of life’, is semantically identical. => vital, water[whisky etymology, whisky origin, 英语词源]