title_body: History of short and tall sizes
upvoted_answer: The Short, Tall, and other sizing names are adopted by Starbucks to denote their own serving sizes. Any use in terms of coffee-serving sizes were coined initially by Starbucks which subsequently led to other coffee shops following suit as an established method.
  
  The list of sizes are as follows:
  
  
  Short 8 fl. oz. / 240mL
  Tall 12 fl. oz. / 350mL
  Grande (Big in Italian) 16 fl. oz. / 470mL 
  Venti (Twenty in Italian) 20 fl. oz. / 590mL for hot drink or 24 fl. oz. / 710mL for cold drink
  Trenta (Thirty in Italian) 30 fl. oz. / 920mL
  
  
  As you can see these words are fairly generic but are used in this way as size-naming convention by Starbucks.
  
  Costa also uses a different size-naming convention based off of Italian words.