What is sherbet?

In the US, sherbet is basically sorbet. It is fruit juice and (sometimes) egg whites frozen together into a dessert that is creamy in texture, but usually tart in flavor, and contains no dairy products. Sometimes orange sherbet is served with vanilla ice cream. It can be floated in punch to cool and flavor it.

In the UK, sherbet is powdered fruit drink mix, or the powder by itself (for Americans: think Kool Ade or Pixy Stix). The powdered sherbet is available as a candy on its own, or as part of another candy.

So which of these is correct?

Sherbet comes from Turkish sherbet or Persian sharbat. Both of those trace back to an arabic word for "drink" and they all referred to a fruit drink. On the surface, this points to the British meaning being closer to the correct usage. However, the middle eastern drink sherbet was often cooled with snow, or blended with snow like a slushy, which is how it got attached to the frozen fruit dessert in the US.

I'm a little stuck on this one. The British usage of sherbet for a beverage is far older than the American usage. However, in actual practice, sherbet in Britain is more often a fruity flavored powder of tartaric acid and sugar. The American frozen dessert usage pre-dates the powdered drink mix/candy. So both usages for the word sherbet are not quite accurate, but not entirely inaccurate.

On balance, I'm going to have to award this one as a tie. Neither one is more or less correct than the other in a purely historical linguistic sense. It annoys me because I totally wanted to give this one to the Americans.