Meaning

noun a general name for beer made with a top fermenting yeast; in some of the United States an ale is (by law) a brew of more than 4% alcohol by volume

originFrom Middle English ale, from Old English ealu, ealo, from Proto-West Germanic *alu, from Proto-Germanic *alu (compare Dutch aal, Icelandic and Swedish öl (“beer”), Danish, Faroese, Norwegian Bokmål, and Norwegian Nynorsk øl (“beer”)), from…

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 3.0