A small cup, often without a handle, used for serving coffee or other beverages in Middle Eastern and North African cultures.
From Arabic 'finjan' (cup), itself borrowed from Persian 'panj' (five), possibly referring to the five-fold decoration or proportion of early cups. The word entered English through 19th-century travel literature and colonial contact.
The fingan has traveled through languages as much as it travels through cultures—'finjan' spread from Persian to Arabic to Turkish to English, and each language borrowed it as trade brought coffee culture westward, making the cup's name literally a map of the Silk Road and the spice trade!
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