Word.ws English Dictionary

in one's cups

in one's cups adjective: drunk; in the act of consuming alcohol liberally.

Adjective

in one’s cups

  1. (idiomatic) Drunk; in the act of consuming alcohol liberally.
    • [T]he natives were an honest, social race of jolly roysterers, who had no objection to a drinking bout, and were very merry in their cups.1809, Washington Irving, chapter 6, in Knickerbocker's History of New York
    • They grew only the more sober in their cups; there was no confused babble nor boisterous laughter. They sucked in the joyous fire of the decanters and kept it smouldering in their inmost recesses.1852, Nathaniel Hawthorne, chapter 21, in The Blithedale Romance
    Synonyms:
    drunk

Synonyms of in one's cups

Questions about in one's cups

What does in one's cups mean?
In one's cups means drunk; in the act of consuming alcohol liberally.
What part of speech is in one's cups?
In one's cups is an adjective.

Words near in one's cups in the dictionary

  1. in one's bare skin
  2. in one's bones
  3. in one's book
  4. in one's born days
  5. in one's corner
  6. in one's cups
  7. in one's dreams
  8. in one's element
  9. in one's feelings
  10. in one's fingers
  11. in one's head

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: in one's cups (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-in one's cups.ogg.

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