It's customary when drinking in company to clink your glass with others and say 'cheers'. This ritual is said to have been in existence for thousands of years.

The word 'cheers' derives from the Greek word 'kara', meaning 'head' and from the Old French word 'chiere', meaning 'face'. The expression 'to be of good cheer' means, therefore, 'to put on a happy face'.

The origins of the clinking ritual are less precise. In one of his novels, Alexandre Dumas wrote that glasses were clinked so that some of each drink spilled into the other, thus proving that each drink was free from poison. This is held by most people as being nothing more than the fictional creation of an imaginative mind, although it might have occurred in various places and times throughout history.

The most common and widely accepted theory is that glasses were clinked together in order to frighten the Devil and any demons out of the drinks. Lending weight to this theory is the fact that Germanic peoples were said to clink drinking mugs together or on the table in order to stun any ghosts that might inhabit their beverages. For the same reason, other natives were also known to ring bells before drinking.