forty-rod
forty-rod noun: cheap, strong whiskey or similar alcoholic beverage.
Noun
forty-rod (uncountable)
- cheap, strong whiskey or similar alcoholic beverage
- […]he got powerful thirsty and clumb out on to the porch-roof and slid down a stanchion and traded his new coat for a jug of forty-rod, and clumb back again and had a good old time1885, Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Tom Sawyer's Comrade), Chapter V
Adjective
forty-rod (not comparable)
- very strong, containing a high concentration of alcohol
- As a result of their laws in some of the states statistics furnish the facts that more “rot gut” whiskey is used than ever before, the milder and more harmless beverages having been in a measure embargoed by the law by reason of the fact that they cannot so easily be smuggled and handled as the...1887, William Hibbard, Rays of Reason: Or Religion Refuted, page 115
- Since it had been laid out so ostentatiously on paper in 1863 it had progressed to the sum total of “two ‘she-bangs’ which fulfill[ed] all requirements of the place by dispensing bacon, coffee, tea, sugar, and calico in limited quantities and forty-rod liquor in unlimited quantities.”1974, Richard Bartlett, Nature’s Yellowstone, pages 151-152
Origin of forty-rod
From forty + rod, a measure of distance, suggesting whiskey so strong it can affect one from 200 meters away.
Questions about forty-rod
- What does forty-rod mean?
- Forty-rod means cheap, strong whiskey or similar alcoholic beverage.
- What part of speech is forty-rod?
- Forty-rod can be a noun or an adjective.
Words near forty-rod in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: forty-rod (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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Cite this entry: “forty-rod.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/forty-rod. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.