The archaic term for a quantity of liquid draught predates English. It’s related to the Old English verb dragan, “to drag”, which probably comes directly from Proto-Indo-European dʰregʰ, “to pull”. The word started referring to a liquid quantity because for most of history, beer barrels were dragged to the customer’s table and tapped right there. This only started changing when John Lofting, a London inventor from the Netherlands, invented the “beer engine” in 1691, a system of flexible hoses that allowed bartenders to manually pump beer from the cellar directly to the bar.

The Middle English word was pronounced the way it was spelled, with the /gh/ sounding like the final consonant in loch, like the “gh” typically was in words like daughter and knight before the sound stopped being part of standard English and was typically dropped. In draught, instead of dropping the /x/ sound (as it’s written in IPA), it became an /f/ sound, and by the 1500s it was even sometimes spelled draft to reflect the pronunciation change. However, some of the derived meanings, like “air current” or “animal that pulls”, predate the variant spelling. While American English almost entirely uses draft unless intentionally evoking archaic language, British English still sometimes uses draught for those senses.

One sense I was surprised to learn about today is the game “English draughts”, which in the US is called “checkers”. In most other European languages, the game is called some form of dames, “ladies”, but in England it got the name draughts, probably because you drag the pieces when you move them. English chess moves were even called draughts for a few hundred years.

Anyway, that’s the story of how I pronounced “healing draught” as “drawt” until I was eighteen.