From 'hammered' to 'bladdered', study finds Brits have 546 words for getting drunk

Have you ever found yourself cabbaged or owly-eyed?
"In British English, at least, there's quite a lot of emphasis on the fun part. And I think that's why there's such a lot of variation, because you want to come up with something new and creative," researchers said.
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Lola Christina Alao22 February 2024

In an old stand-up routine, comedian Michael McIntyre once argued that posh people can use any word to mean drunk in English. 

So two German linguists took it upon themselves to find out if there was any truth to the comedian’s claim.

“We were curious to find out if the synonyms of “drunk” are used in similar contexts,” explained the study's co-author Professor Dr. Christina Sanchez-Stockhammer of Chemnitz University in a press release.

The findings, published in the Yearbook of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association, found that Brits do indeed use a vast variety of synonyms to describe being drunk - 546, to be exact. 

These so-called 'drunkonyms' range from 'hammered' to 'bladdered' to 'sozzled' to 'steampigged'; proving that any word in the English language can be turned into a descriptive for having had one too many - with the addition of 'ed' at the end. 

"What I found very interesting is that if you look at these words that are used for being drunk, many of them use indirectness as a resource. Like, 'I was totally gazeboed'. I mean, what's the relation between a gazebo and being drunk? It's at least not immediately obvious," Professor Sanchez-Stockhammer tells Euronews Culture.

"As humans, we can usually find some way of interpreting this. For example, that possibly people would get drunk in gazebos? But I don't know to what extent that is true. To normal listeners, the relation will be unclear. And that's what makes it funny."

Such indirectness also lends itself to the spirited sensibilities of Cockney rhyming slang, with examples of 'Brahms and Liszt' or 'Scotch mist' being used to describe being drunk.

"Probably we shouldn't have said that these are synonyms of 'drunk' but they're actually synonyms of 'pi**ed'," says Professor Sanchez-Stockhammer, explaining that the majority of these 'drunkonyms' are formed according to the same rhythmic pattern.

The researchers also found that there's a tendency for Brits to miss out words, with 'blind drunk' and 'nicely drunk' being shortened solely to their prefacers 'blind' and 'nicely', something that is harder to do in other languages where you have inflections, Sanchez-Stockhammer notes. 

"In British English, at least, there's quite a lot of emphasis on the fun part. And I think that's why there's such a lot of variation, because you want to come up with something new and creative," they added. 

What are the 546 words expressing the state of drunkenness?

As stated by Sanchez-Stockhammer and Uhrig: “The 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

The list is sorted, first in descending order by the number of resources in which the word occurs, 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)

  • hammered (3)

  • langers (3)

  • lashed (3)

  • loaded (3)

  • ossified (3)

  • paralytic (3)

  • pissed (3)

  • rat-arsed (3)

  • ratted (3)

  • screwed (3)

  • slaughtered (3)

  • sozzled (3)

  • squiffy (3)

  • steaming (3)

  • stewed (3)

  • stoned (3)

  • tanked (3)

  • tiddly (3)

  • tight (3)

  • well-oiled (3)

  • wrecked (3)

  • zonked (3)

  • Adrian Quist (2)

  • arseholed (2)

  • beered-up (2)

  • besotted (2)

  • blocked (2)

  • blottoed (2)

  • blue (2)

  • bollocksed (2)

  • bottled (2)

  • buzzed (2)

  • clobbered (2)

  • cocked (2)

  • cockeyed (2)

  • corned (2)

  • corny (2)

  • crocked (2)

  • c***** (2)

  • cup-shot (2)

  • cut (2)

  • disguised (2)

  • ebriose (2)

  • ebrious (2)

  • elevated (2)

  • faced (2)

  • fap (2)

  • flustered (2)

  • fluthered (2)

  • fou (2)

  • fresh (2)

  • fried (2)

  • f***** (2)

  • full (2)

  • gassed (2)

  • ginned (2)

  • glorious (2)

  • gone (2)

  • groggy (2)

  • high (2)

  • honkers (2)

  • inebriate (2)

  • jolly (2)

  • juiced (2)

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  • liquored up (2)

  • lit (2)

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  • minging (2)

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