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Starbucks

proper nounnounproper nounattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈstɑːˌbʌks//
  • United States//ˈstɑɹˌbʌks//

A widespread chain of coffee shops.

proper noun

  1. 1

    A widespread chain of coffee shops.

    Each week, more than 33 million folks worldwide pass through a Starbucks. Plus, up to three Starbucks open every day somewhere on the globe.

    Consider the Starbucks effect in the slogans written up recently in Fast Company magazine, where companies from various sectors now aspire to be the 'Starbucks of their respective industry': ...

    On my three-block walk to the subway I noticed not one, not two, but four Starbucks, which was quite a high concentration of retail outlets even for the Queen of Caffeine.

    Companies now want to turn themselves into “the Starbucks of the ham business” or “the Starbucks of fuel-injector makers.”

Etymology

From Starbuck (surname) + -s. The chain of coffee shops is named after Starbuck, a character in Herman Melville's novel Moby-Dick. Melville named the character in honor of the Starbuck family, a prominent whaling family based in Nantucket, Massachusetts. The surname itself derives from the community of Starbeck in North Yorkshire, England.

noun

  1. 1

    A coffee from Starbucks.

    I swear, if I had been drinking my Starbucks today it would have gone up my nose.

    One part-time sociologist made an even more damning indictment: “Calling yourself a coffee nerd while drinking Starbucks is like calling yourself a beer nerd while drinking Budweiser.”

    I read it straight through while I drank three Starbucks.

    “Good, have they got coffee?” Lorraine nodded. “Yes, they’ve been in since about eight and brought Starbucks.”

proper noun

  1. 1

    Also a form of Starbuckplural of Starbuck (a surname)

Forms

plural
Starbuckses
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).