Candy is a term derived from the Arabic qandi, meaning a sugar confection. In North America it is a general term for sweets of all kinds; in Britain it was used in a more restricted range of meanings, notably to indicate sweetmeats coated or glazed with sugar.

The people of antiquity made sweetmeats of honey before they had sugar: the Chinese, Indians, Middle Easterners, the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans used it to coat fruit, flowers, seeds and plant stems, to preserve them for use in the kind of confectionery still made today.

Confectionery in the middle ages began as a marriage of spices and sugar, and was intended to have a therapeutic function, as an aid to digestive troubles due to the excessive intake of food which was neither very fresh nor very well balanced. Diners often took the habit of taking these sweetmeats to their rooms as an after dinner medicine.

Over time the word sweetmeats evolved into sweets and sweeties, but we like to call them candy!