Word.ws English Dictionary

full as a tick

full as a tick adjective: engorged with food or drink, especially alcoholic drink.

Adjective

full as a tick

  1. (simile) Engorged with food or drink, especially alcoholic drink.
    • Then we drank up all the beer, and threw the bottles into the water and fired at them. . . . "Stop ut!" shouted Mulvaney. "Whin you've fired into nothin' as often as me, over a better man than yoursilf, you will not make a mock av thim orders. 'Tis worse than whistlin' the Dead March in barricks....1890, Rudyard Kipling, “The Madness of Private Ortheris”, in Indian Tales
    • [B]etween that Dutch cattle salesman and the barkeeper and myself, it would have taken a bookkeeper to have kept a check on the drinks we consumed. . . . Well, I took a seat for a shine, and for two hours I sat there as full as a tick, and as dignified as a judge on the bench.1904, Andy Adams, chapter 5, in A Texas Matchmaker

Synonyms of full as a tick

Questions about full as a tick

What does full as a tick mean?
Full as a tick means engorged with food or drink, especially alcoholic drink.
What part of speech is full as a tick?
Full as a tick is an adjective.

Words near full as a tick in the dictionary

  1. full angle
  2. full angles
  3. full artificial intelligence
  4. full as a boot
  5. full as a goog
  6. full as a tick
  7. full back
  8. full backs
  9. full bar
  10. full bathroom
  11. full bathrooms

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: full as a tick (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-full as a tick.ogg.

Cite this entry: “full as a tick.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/full_as_a_tick. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.