History of short and tall sizes

Question

Does the short and tall sizing come from Starbucks or did Starbucks adopt it?

In my understanding short and tall are generic terms, but when I left Seattle (and in Seattle when I came back) it seemed there was a stigma against the terms because they were from Starbucks. Did Starbucks introduce these terms, and then other places in Seattle adopted it? Were the terms a part of Seattle coffee culture and Starbucks, as a part of that culture, used it too?

Maybe Seattle has nothing to do with it—I just know that in Seattle more non-Starbucks places use the same lexicon than elsewhere.

Answer 1

The Short, Tall, and other sizing names are adopted by Starbucks to denote their own serving sizes. Any use in terms of coffee-serving sizes were coined initially by Starbucks which subsequently led to other coffee shops following suit as an established method.

The list of sizes are as follows:

• Short 8 fl. oz. / 240mL
• Tall 12 fl. oz. / 350mL
• Grande (Big in Italian) 16 fl. oz. / 470mL
• Venti (Twenty in Italian) 20 fl. oz. / 590mL for hot drink or 24 fl. oz. / 710mL for cold drink
• Trenta (Thirty in Italian) 30 fl. oz. / 920mL

As you can see these words are fairly generic but are used in this way as size-naming convention by Starbucks.

Costa also uses a different size-naming convention based off of Italian words.