Discover the 546 English words for drunk

A new study by two German linguists has discovered that there are 546 words in the English language to describe being in a state of drunkenness.

The report in the Yearbook of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association, titled I’m gonna get totally and utterly X-ed: Constructing drunkenness, was undertaken by Professor Christina Sanchez-Stockhammer of Chemnitz University of Technology and Peter Uhrig of Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg.

It discovered that Britain’s drinking culture and sense of humour played a critical role in the large number of words used.

In its conclusion, the authors said that there had been “for a long time” a “wealth of terms for states of drunkenness in the English language”.

They said: “We have shown that there are (at least until recently) productive patterns of creating new words meaning ‘drunk’, or rather ‘pissed’.

“We can say that the wide range of words observed in the already existing lists of drunkonyms seems to support the view that there is a large amount of words that one could potentially use to creatively express drunkenness in English.”

Gazeboed

Some people, such as comedian Michael McIntyre, have argued the use of so-called “drunkonyms” could be achieved simply by adding “-ed” to a word, such as “Gazeboed”, even though the original word and meaning had no relation to a state of drunkenness. This was especially the case if you added “I got completely…” at the beginning of the sentence.

But the linguists questioned the view that “any word” could be used to mean drunk. They also looked at the impact of rhyming slang on drunkonyms, such as “Brahms” and “Schindler’s” being short for “Brahms and Liszt” and “Schindler’s List” to rhyme with the word “pissed”.

They concluded: “There is ample potential for future studies into the question of expressing drunkenness in English, as our two productive constructions only apply to less than half of all drunkonyms collected. Thus forms such as blotto, slug-nutty or stocious need accounting for, and it appears that in the expression of drunkenness in English, the storage of seemingly unmotivated forms plays a major role.”

Sanchez-Stockhammer told The Times: “In Eng­lish there’s an extremely large number of words that can mean drunk, and more can be formed simply by adding ‘ed’ to the end. It means pretty much any word in Britain can inherit the meaning ‘drunk’ from the context.

“This humorous modifying of words is only possible because of the way sentences are constructed in English and because the British really enjoy witty wordplay.

“For example, it would not work in German.”

The 546 words expressing the state of drunkenness

As stated by Sanchez-Stockhammer and Uhrig: “The following list combines material from the Oxford English Dictionary, Collins Dictionary’s thesaurus, Wiktionary’s thesaurus as well as synonyms for drunk collected by the audience of BBC One’s Booze programme (cf. Section 1 for details). The list is sorted, first in descending order by the number of resources in which the word occurs (indicated by a figure between 1 and 4 in parentheses), and then alphabetically within each frequency group.”

bladdered (4)

inebriated (4)

intoxicated (4)

langered (4)

legless (4)

mashed (4)

merry (4)

mullered (4)

pickled (4)

pie-eyed (4)

plastered (4)

sloshed (4)

smashed (4)

tipsy (4)

trashed (4)

wasted (4)

bevvied (3)

blasted (3)

blitzed (3)

blootered (3)

blotto (3)

bombed (3)

cabbaged (3)

canned (3)

fuddled (3)

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ossified (3)

paralytic (3)

pissed (3)

rat-arsed (3)

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squiffy (3)

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Oliver (1)

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overcome (1)

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pinko (1)

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Schindlers (1)

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slued (1)

slug-nutty (1)

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