entry
booze
/buːz/Informal word for alcoholic drink or drinking heavily
From Middle English / Northern English dialect bowse (to drink heavily).
from Middle Dutch buse "drinking vessel" (also as a verb, busen "to drink heavily"), which is related to Middle High...
Word Ancestry
from Middle Dutch buse "drinking vessel" (also as a verb, busen "to drink heavily"), which is related to Middle High...
This is one of those words that seems almost too on-the-nose to be real. Long before any neon bar sign or frat-house chant, English speakers were already using a northern dialect word, bowse, for drinking hard, and that trail leads back to Middle Dutch buse, a drinking vessel. A vessel, then the stuff in it, then the act itself — language does that all the time, like a pub where the glass slowly becomes the habit. The spelling with -z- may have gotten a little nudge from a real 19th-century Philadelphia distiller named E.G. Booz, which is deliciously accidental: the man did not invent the word, but his surname helped it look even more like a proper saloon sign. Johnson’s dictionary even records rambooze, a winter drink of wine, ale, eggs, and sugar, which sounds less like a beverage than a dare. If you want the whole history in one image, picture a wooden barrel in a smoky room: first the container, then the pour, then the party, and finally the headache.
The Story
This is one of those words that seems almost too on-the-nose to be real. Long before any neon bar sign or frat-house chant, English speakers were already using a northern dialect word, bowse, for drinking hard, and that trail leads back to Middle Dutch buse, a drinking vessel. A vessel, then the stuff in it, then the act itself — language does that all the time, like a pub where the glass slowly becomes the habit. The spelling with -z- may have gotten a little nudge from a real 19th-century Philadelphia distiller named E.G. Booz, which is deliciously accidental: the man did not invent the word, but his surname helped it look even more like a proper saloon sign. Johnson’s dictionary even records rambooze, a winter drink of wine, ale, eggs, and sugar, which sounds less like a beverage than a dare. If you want the whole history in one image, picture a wooden barrel in a smoky room: first the container, then the pour, then the party, and finally the headache.
Kin & Kindred
From 'bowse'·to drink heavily; a drinking bout
Derived Terms
English words from this root