Spirituous comes from French spiritueux or directly from Latin spiritus ('breath, spirit', and in distillation 'volatile essence') + -ous. The historical chain includes Latin spiritus and Latin spirare. Older glosses in the chain include "breath, spirit" and "volatile essence", which help explain the semantic range of the modern word. Morphologically, spirituous is best read as compound, suffixal formation, and borrowing, yielding an English adjective shaped by both form history and later usage. In current English it functions as an adjective, with the sense "containing or having the qualities of distilled alcohol". related forms include spirit and spirits. The result is an English adjective whose etymology preserves the older forms while supporting the word's specialized modern meaning.