Aussie Slang for Being Drunk: The Dated History

Why so many words?

Ask an Australian for a word meaning drunk and you will get a long list, and nearly every one has a paper trail. Using the dated evidence in Green’s Dictionary of Slang, this guide follows Australian drinking slang from the 1850s to the 1990s.

A caution first. The earliest recorded example only shows what someone wrote down first, so treat every date below as “no later than”, not “invented in”.

1850s: plain old “full”

The oldest way to say drunk is the simplest. “Full” meaning drunk goes back to about 1575 in British writing, and Green’s earliest Australian example is from Bell’s Life in Sydney on 7 August 1852. Green’s says that later use is mainly Australian, and it is the root of the “full as a…” similes further down.

1880s to 1900s: new words for the drink and the drinker

The late 1800s brought a burst of Australian drinking slang, mostly in the Sydney Bulletin and other newspapers.

Irrigate means to have a drink. Green’s tags it Aus./US, and its first Australian example is a Bulletin item from 22 August 1885.

Boozington, a drunkard, first turns up in the Sydney Evening News in 1886 (see the Boozington page).

Turps is short for turpentine and means alcohol. In the Australian sense of beer, Green’s first example is a Sydney paper, Dead Bird, from 12 October 1889.

Tid means a drink, or a drunkard. Green’s tags it usually Australian, treats it as short for “tiddly”, and finds it in the Brisbane Queenslander on 16 August 1890.

Shickered was borrowed from the Yiddish word shikker, and the first example is the Bulletin of 1898.

Drinky, meaning a bit tipsy, is tagged Aus./US, with its first Australian example in the Bulletin in 1901.

1900s and 1910s: getting properly plastered

Inked (up) means drunk, and Green’s tags it Aus./N.Z., with its first example in the Bulletin on 19 November 1908.

Blithered means very drunk. Green’s explains it as coming from “blither”, the way the very drunk fail to talk clearly, and its first example is the Bulletin of 12 October 1911. Every example in its entry is Australian.

1930s: the “full as a…” similes

Then came a family of comparisons. Green’s lists “full as a bull” first, from the Townsville Daily Bulletin in 1932, then “full as a state school” from the Melbourne Argus in December 1938, and “full as a boot”, first found in the Burnie Advocate in Tasmania in 1939.

“Full as a goog” is linked in Green’s to nursery talk, where a “goog” is a “googy egg”, and a 1982 Australian book notes that it was used for both drunkenness and a full stomach. “Full as the family po” appears in 1963, and Barry Humphries’ 1985 book Traveller’s Tool piles on even more elaborate versions.

Plenty of the comparisons are older and not Australian at all. Green’s earliest “full as a tun” is British from 1546, and Green’s earliest “full as a tick” is from an American almanac of 1822, so Australians borrowed the pattern and then made their own.

Later arrivals

Piss-up, a drinking party, is tagged UK, Australian, Irish and Scottish in Green’s, and its earliest example is a 1952 British letter. The first Australian one is from 1967.

Munted is the youngest word here. Green’s lists “very drunk” as one sense of Australian and American teen slang, with its first Australian example in Gerald Seal’s 1999 book Lingo.

What the dates tell us

Three patterns stand out. Some words are borrowings, like shickered from Yiddish. Some are shortenings, like turps and tid. And a lot are comparisons, from the 1930s “full as a…” family onward.

Some of the older words, such as boozington, have no modern examples in Green’s, while “full as a…” and “piss-up” are still going.

Want to test yourself? In Aussie-fy our daily game starts with the word “drunk”, and the archive has the answers to every past round.

Sources

All dates and region tags come from Green’s Dictionary of Slang: shickered, boozington, irrigate, turps, tid, drinky, inked (up), blithered, full as…, piss-up, munted.