Speakur

Word Pronunciation & Dictionary

drunk as david's sow

Word Rarity Rare

Frequency: Zipf frequency 3.08 in modern English

Syllables
drunk- as -david's -sow
IPA
29
Scrabble Score
16
Letters
4
Syllables
11
Unique Chars

Meaning

adj

Thoroughly drunk.

Etymology

Francis Grose, in his A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785), claims derivation from an instance in which a man named David Lloyd, who was accustomed to showing his six-legged sow as a curiosity, found his intoxicated wife where he expected the sow to be. Grose's dictionary was meant as a work of humour, and this story is almost certainly fanciful. Variants of the phrase predate it by over a century (see e.g. R. Monsey's Scarronides (1665) "As drunk as any Davids Sows" (p. 20)).

Synonyms

drunk as a cunt drunk as a fiddler drunk as a fiddler's bitch drunk as a lord drunk as a piper drunk as a skunk drunk as a sow drunk as a wheelbarrow drunk as an owl drunk as Chloe full as a goog pissed as a fart

Questions

What does drunk as david's sow mean?
Thoroughly drunk.
Where does drunk as david's sow come from?
Francis Grose, in his A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785), claims derivation from an instance in which a man named David Lloyd, who was accustomed to showing his six-legged sow as a curiosity, found his intoxicated wife where he expected the sow to be. Grose's dictionary was meant as a work of humour, and this story is almost certainly fanciful. Variants of the phrase predate it by over a century (see e.g. R. Monsey's Scarronides (1665) "As drunk as any Davids Sows" (p. 20)).

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