Learn English – Word for a person who likes to hang out in cafes

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I'm looking for a word equivalent to "barfly" applying to people who like to spend time lingering and socializing in cafes next to a coffee or a beer. It can be a slang term or something historical.

Best Answer

I can not think of a single word in English, but we typically just call these people café-goers because they go to the café. Wiktionary1 is the only dictionary which directly attests this as a word, which it defines as "One who goes to a café". This gives somebody some room to be doubtful, but the more reputable dictionaries show that goer is applied as a sort of suffix with the following examples:

  • churchgoer 2
  • filmgoer 3
  • clubgoer 4
  • beachgoer 4

Granted, I do not expect there to be many more examples of such words, and cafe-goer is the very rarest of them on this Google nGrams chart comparing the various goers with barfly:

This is a screenshot of google ngrams comparing cafe-goer, churchgoer,filmgoer,clubgoer,beachgoer,theatregoer and barfly on a range from the early 1800s that is hosted on archive.is for additional reliability

However, various words using the goer suffix are used about as often as barfly, and even the small sample still consists of dozens of readily accessible printed quotations. I also sometimes heard it in news reports to name the customers of establishments such as Starbucks. Take the Forbes article China's Coffee Culture which was written by Maura Elizabeth Cunningham and published on April 28th, 2010 for example:

Aside from one caffeine-dependent American student, most of the other cafe-goers fell into three general categories. There were often tables of middle-aged Chinese women chatting over coffee and pastries, especially in the late morning and early afternoon. Businessmen also held meetings at some coffee shops, though on more than one occasion I saw their frustration at the strict no-smoking policies in places like Starbucks and Costa Coffee. The third group was composed of young couples, who would often get comfortable on the cafe's couches, nurse drinks and watch DVDs on a laptop together.


Aside from being a respectable source, its usage here is used to preface the sorts cafe-goers in a manner similar enough to how I might expect barfly to preface the various sorts of more infamous patrons who might visit a bar, although I can not exactly find a good example for comparison at the moment.

1 Wiktionary licenses the excerpted text under CC-BY-SA 3.0 terms.
2 Collins English Dictionary—Complete and Unabridged, 12th Edition s.v., goer
3 Random House Kerenerman Webster's Dictionary (© 2010) s.v., goer
4 The American Heritage Dictionary 5th Edition, s.v., goer

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