Word.ws English Dictionary

drunk as David's sow

drunk as David's sow adjective: thoroughly drunk.

Adjective

drunk as David's sow (not comparable)

  1. (simile) Thoroughly drunk.

Synonyms of drunk as David's sow

4 more synonymsFewer synonyms

Origin of drunk as David's sow

Francis Grose, in his A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785), claims derivation from an instance in which a man named David Lloyd, who was accustomed to showing his six-legged sow as a curiosity, found his intoxicated wife where he expected the sow to be. Grose's dictionary was meant as a work of humour, and this story is almost certainly fanciful. Variants of the phrase predate it by over a century (see e.g. R. Monsey's Scarronides (1665) "As drunk as any Davids Sows" (p. 20)).

Questions about drunk as David's sow

What does drunk as David's sow mean?
Drunk as David's sow means thoroughly drunk.
What part of speech is drunk as David's sow?
Drunk as David's sow is an adjective.

Words near drunk as David's sow in the dictionary

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

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: drunk as David's sow (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-drunk as David's sow.ogg.

Cite this entry: “drunk as David's sow.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/drunk_as_david%27s_sow. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.