Word.ws English Dictionary

dry drunk

dry drunk noun: a recovering alcoholic who is not drinking alcohol, but has relapsed mentally and emotionally;.

Noun

dry drunk (plural dry drunks)

  1. A recovering alcoholic who is not drinking alcohol, but has relapsed mentally and emotionally;
    • Denise called Frank a "dry drunk." He no longer drank but he continued to indulge in "the same wild, erratic behavior binges" without the "excuse of alcohol" in his system.2013, Kate Maloy, Margaret Jones Patterson, Birth Or Abortion?: Private Struggles in a Political World, →ISBN
    • "I think Big Jed's dad may be a dry drunk. He seems to have all the problems of an alcoholic, just not the drinking.[…]"2020, M. D. Linville M. Meadows, A Spiritual Pathway to Recovery from Addiction, A Physician's Journey of Discovery, →ISBN
    1. Such a relapse.
      • Family members frequently report that a dry drunk is as difficult to live with as a "wet drunk." After all, it is not the drinking and drugging that bothers family members but the abusive, unpredictable behavior that comes with it.1991, Philip St. Romain, Freedom from Codependency, →ISBN, page 60
      • One of the best ways out of a "dry drunk" is to work with another still-suffering alcoholic.1995, Hamilton B., Getting Started in AA, →ISBN, page 186
  2. (by analogy) Any substance addict who has quit using, but remains psychologically dependent.
    • Abstinence leaves me without nicotine, but still living with the old beliefs and behaviors that cry for the drug—in short, living a "dry drunk."1990, Ellen Walker, Smoker: Self-portrait of a Nicotine Addict, →ISBN

Adjective

dry drunk (not comparable)

  1. Being a recovering alcoholic who has quit drinking alcohol, but remains psychologically dependent.
    • But more interestingly, they distinguish between being "dry drunk"—being on the wagon, but still wanting to drink—and being "sober," neither drinking nor wanting to.2017, The Best of The Lifted Brow: Volume Two, →ISBN

Forms of dry drunk

pluraldry drunks

Questions about dry drunk

What does dry drunk mean?
Dry drunk means a recovering alcoholic who is not drinking alcohol, but has relapsed mentally and emotionally;.
What part of speech is dry drunk?
Dry drunk can be a noun or an adjective.
What is the plural of dry drunk?
The plural of dry drunk is dry drunks.

Words near dry drunk in the dictionary

  1. dry distillation
  2. dry distillations
  3. dry dock
  4. dry docks
  5. Dry Doddington
  6. dry drunk
  7. dry drunks
  8. dry erase
  9. dry eye
  10. dry eye syndrome
  11. dry eyes

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: dry drunk (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: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-dry drunk.wav.

Cite this entry: “dry drunk.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/dry_drunk. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.