Chopin

The Scots half-pint, equal to two mutchkins, from the French chopine.

Two mutchkins make a chopin, about 848ml, and two chopins make the Scots pint. It is the half-pint of the Scottish system, and like a good deal of Scots vocabulary it arrived from France: the chopine was a French measure before it was a Scottish one, which is the Auld Alliance showing up in the pub rather than in the archives.

The name is more familiar than the measure. It survives in Scots verse and in the drinking songs, where a chopin is simply a decent quantity, and most people who have encountered the word have never had to know that it was eight hundred and forty-eight millilitres.

Set against imperial measure it comes to about a pint and a half, which means that ordering a chopin and ordering a half-pint were, by the time the two systems met, not remotely the same transaction.