bourbon

Noun

bourbon (countable and uncountable, plural bourbons)

1. A whiskey distilled in the United States from a mixture of grains in which at least 51% is corn, aged in charred, new oak barrels.
2. A serving of bourbon whiskey.
   • It concerns the gnomelike quality of the average American at a party. I have been to many parties where staid American business men have been transformed by a few ryes or bourbons into unpredictable gremlins out for adventure.1946, George Johnston, Skyscrapers in the Mist, page 17
3. A Bourbon biscuit.

Proper noun capitalized: Bourbon

IPA/ˈbʊə(ɹ).bən/

Bourbon

1. A European dynasty which reigns in Spain and formerly ruled the Kingdom of France.
2. A surname from French.
3. (Southern US, historical) A Bourbon Democrat.
   • It was "a fundamental impossibility" for a black person to be a Bourbon, white-supremacist Democrat, but a black individual could very well become a "progressive Democrat."1988, Herbert Shapiro, White Violence and Black Response: From Reconstruction to Montgomery, →ISBN
   • As a practical matter, blacks had been denied a fair vote and a fair count even before the 1901 Constitution, because the Black Belt Bourbon white politicians used fraud and intimidation to manipulate the black vote to support conservative Democratic candidates.1992, West's Federal Supplement (first series), vol. 787, p. 1090.
   1. (Southern US, historical, especially Mississippi) A white conservative, particularly in the context of opposition to equal rights for black people.
      • For the Bourbon White elite and their allies, the intimidation of the Black laborers and farmers was necessary to prevent their political involvement and to maintain their subjugated location in the economy.2014, Akinyele Omowale Umoja, We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement, →ISBN
4. A county in Kentucky, see Bourbon County.
5. A street in New Orleans, Louisiana; in full, Bourbon Street.
6. (obsolete) The island of Réunion.
7. A town in Indiana.
8. A city in Missouri.