Word.ws English Dictionary

blue ruin

blue ruin noun: low-end gin, usually home-made.

Noun

blue ruin (uncountable)

  1. (archaic, slang) Low-end gin, usually home-made.
    • ‘Till you're full of rag water and bitters and blue ruin’1985, Tom Waits, 9th and Hennepin
    • ‘tell us who the devil ye all are, and what business ye have here, rigged off like the foul fiends, and swilling the snug blue ruin stowed away for the winter by my honest shipmate, Will Wimble the undertaker!’1835, Edgar Allan Poe, King Pest
  2. Complete and utter ruin, desolation.
    • "It's blue ruin." He laughed for the third time. I notice that people always laugh when they prophesy blue ruin.1934, Philip Gibbs, European journey, page 116
    • For a nation to wait in a market of heavily reduced prices for the still lower prices of blue ruin, even if it could wait, would be economic suicide...1921, Elbert E. Stevens, Labor digest, page 21

Examples of blue ruin in a sentence

  • Bagshot had dried his tears and applied himself to his favourite drink,--which, by the way, was "blue ruin,"--the work of division took place.’1830, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford Ch. XVI
  • SIR DEATH is a grim old fellow ; Yet rather facetious at times, When "blue ruin" makes him mellow, And he chants his Stygian rhymes.1841, Thomas Noel, Rymes and roundelayes, page 197:
  • The fighters joined their admirers in lushing Blue Ruin, which was just another name for Daffy, or gin, and Heavy Wet, which was ale.1996, A. J. Liebling et al., A Neutral Corner: Boxing Essays, page 35:
  • You had enough blue ruin to make any man stagger.2005, Edith Layton, Gypsy Lover, page 133:

Questions about blue ruin

What does blue ruin mean?
Blue ruin means low-end gin, usually home-made.
How do you use blue ruin in a sentence?
Bagshot had dried his tears and applied himself to his favourite drink,--which, by the way, was "blue ruin,"--the work of division took place.’
What part of speech is blue ruin?
Blue ruin is a noun.

Words near blue ruin in the dictionary

  1. blue roll
  2. blue room
  3. blue rooms
  4. blue rubber
  5. blue rubber bleb nevus syndrome
  6. blue ruin
  7. blue runner
  8. blue runners
  9. Blue Russia
  10. Blue Russian
  11. Blue Russians

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: blue ruin (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-au-blue ruin.ogg.

Cite this entry: “blue ruin.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/blue_ruin. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.