Word.ws English Dictionary

hooch

/huːt͡ʃ/

hooch noun: an alcoholic beverage, especially an inferior or illicit one and especially liquor such as whisky. Also the alternative form of hoosh.

Noun (1)

hooch (countable and uncountable, plural hooches)

  1. (Canada, US, informal) An alcoholic beverage, especially an inferior or illicit one and especially liquor such as whisky.
    • he was so grief-stricken that he literally drowned his sorrow in “hootch-i-noo,” the native equivalent of whiskey. […] Had he not been so sad he would not have drunk the “hootch,” and if he had not drunk the hootch he would not have died: a perfectly reasonable and logical argument.c. 1910, O.M. Salisbury, chapter 3, in Quoth the raven: A little journey into the primitive, Seattle: Superior Publishing Company, published 1962, page 17
    • Bring on the free hooch!1997, Kevin Smith, Chasing Amy, spoken by Banky Edwards (Jason Lee)

Noun (2)

hooch (plural hooches)

  1. (Vietnam War-era military slang) A thatched hut, CHU, or any simple dwelling.
    • Burn the hooches.2022 December 6, Avatar: The Way of Water, spoken by Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang)

Also used as

hooch is also the alternative form of hoosh.

Forms of hooch

pluralhooches
alternative formhootch

Origin of hooch

Abbreviation of hoochinoo, name of a specific liquor, from Tlingit Xutsnoowú Ḵwáan, the group that produced it, from Hutsnuwu (“grizzly bear fort”), the name of the village on Admiralty Island in which they lived. From Tlingit xóots (“grizzly bear”).

First attested in the 1950s, probably borrowed from Japanese 家(うち) (uchi, “house”), especially the dialectal form with an initial h- used on the Ryukyu islands where many American soldiers were based.

Words formed from hooch

Words that rhyme with hooch

Questions about hooch

What does hooch mean?
Hooch means an alcoholic beverage, especially an inferior or illicit one and especially liquor such as whisky.
What part of speech is hooch?
Hooch is a noun.
How do you pronounce hooch?
Hooch is pronounced /huːt͡ʃ/.
What is the plural of hooch?
The plural of hooch is hooches.

Words near hooch in the dictionary

  1. hooah
  2. hoobae
  3. hoobaes
  4. Hoobler
  5. Hooblers
  6. hooch
  7. hooched
  8. hooched up
  9. hooched-up
  10. hooches
  11. hoochie

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: hooch (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-hooch.ogg.

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