latte

Noun (1)

latte (countable and uncountable, plural lattes)

1. A drink of coffee made from espresso and steamed milk, generally topped with foam.
   • Lilian Benedict walked into the office carrying two cups of latte.1991, Jayne Ann Krentz, chapter 12, in Sweet Fortune, New York, N.Y.: Pocket Books, →ISBN, page 208
   • Yet in “Through a Latte, Darkly”, a new study of how Starbucks has largely avoided paying tax in Britain, Edward Kleinbard […] shows that current tax rules make it easy for all sorts of firms to generate what he calls “stateless income”: […]. In Starbucks’s case, the firm has in effect turned the...2013 June 22, “T time”, in The Economist, volume 407, number 8841, archived from the original on 04 Aug 2020, page 68

   Synonyms:

   caffè latte, cafe latté, coffee latté

2. (broadly) A similar drink, where the espresso is replaced with some other flavoring ingredient such as chai, maté or matcha (green tea).
   • matcha latte
3. (attributive, figuratively, informal) Affluent leftism.
   • latte liberal
   • Newt Gingrich accused New York mayor Bill De Blasio of “small soy latte liberalism” in 2014 – emphasising that the only thing more girlish than drinking a big dairy milky coffee was drinking a small vegan milky coffee.2025 September 4, Sam Wolfson, quoting Newt Gingrich, “Latte-swilling ‘performative males’: why milky drinks are shorthand for liberal”, in The Guardian, →ISSN, archived from the original on 26 Sep...

Noun (2)

IPA/ˈlæ.ti/

latte (plural lattes)

1. A pillar capped by a hemispherical stone capital with the flat side facing up, used as building supports by the ancient Chamorro people and now used as a sign of Chamorro identity.