Word.ws English Dictionary

drunk as Chloe

drunk as Chloe adjective: very drunk.

Adjective

drunk as Chloe (not comparable)

  1. (Australia, UK, colloquial, simile) Very drunk.
    • Drunk as Chloe; she must have been an uproarious lass.1823, Drink, entry in Jon Badcock, Slang: A Dictionary of the Turf, the Ring, the Chase, the Pit, or Bon-Ton, page 71
    • Sorry to observe that Seymour had ‘been at his tricks,’ and was as drunk as Chloe ! — as the saying is ; but as to who Chloe was, my reading never informed me.1840, Charles Dickens, William Harrison Ainsworth, Albert Smith, “The Journal of Old Barnes, the Pantaloon: On a trip to Paris, in 1830”, in Bentley's Miscellany, volume 5, page 466

Examples of drunk as Chloe in a sentence

  • They were all as drunk as Chloe, and I being a little in a sympathetic condition, they took me into their confidence.1859, Melbourne Punch, volume 8, page 40:
  • It was a regular thing for many of the clergy to be as drunk as Chloe on Saturday night, get through their sermon on Sunday morning, and get drunk and sober again before the evening.1904, New Zealand House of Representatives, chapter L, in Parliamentary Debates, page 53:

Synonyms of drunk as Chloe

4 more synonymsFewer synonyms

Origin of drunk as Chloe

Possibly a reference to the Chloe mentioned in the poetry of Matthew Prior. * Australian vernacular usage (reported by Partridge and others) is influenced by, and often thought to refer to, the well-known nude painting Chloé, which was hung briefly (in 1883) at the National Gallery of Victoria, and later (from 1908) at the Young and Jacksons hotel, Melbourne.

Questions about drunk as Chloe

What does drunk as Chloe mean?
Drunk as Chloe means very drunk.
How do you use drunk as Chloe in a sentence?
They were all as drunk as Chloe, and I being a little in a sympathetic condition, they took me into their confidence.
What part of speech is drunk as Chloe?
Drunk as Chloe is an adjective.

Words near drunk as Chloe in the dictionary

  1. drunk as a piper
  2. drunk as a skunk
  3. drunk as a sow
  4. drunk as a wheelbarrow
  5. drunk as an owl
  6. drunk as Chloe
  7. drunk as David's sow
  8. drunk dial
  9. drunk dialed
  10. drunk dialing
  11. drunk dialled

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: drunk as Chloe (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.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: EN-AU ck1 drunk as Chloe.ogg.

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