Word.ws English Dictionary

name one's poison

name one's poison verb: to indicate what type of alcoholic beverage one wishes to be served.

Verb

name one's poison (third-person singular simple present names one's poison, present participle naming one's poison, simple past and past participle named one's poison)

  1. (idiomatic) To indicate what type of alcoholic beverage one wishes to be served.

Forms of name one's poison

third-person singular presentnames one's poison
present participlenaming one's poison
past participlenamed one's poison
pastnamed one's poison

Origin of name one's poison

From the US prohibition era, when the government required that the base ingredients for many products have poisons added to them to make it harder for them to be distilled into alcohol. As a result, much of the prohibition alcohol was actually poison when not distilled completely or properly.

Questions about name one's poison

What does name one's poison mean?
Name one's poison means to indicate what type of alcoholic beverage one wishes to be served.
What part of speech is name one's poison?
Name one's poison is a verb.
What is the past tense of name one's poison?
The past tense of name one's poison is named one's poison.

Words near name one's poison in the dictionary

  1. name drops
  2. name for
  3. name it, claim it
  4. name names
  5. name of the game
  6. name one's poison
  7. name part
  8. name parts
  9. name plate
  10. name plates
  11. name reaction

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: name one's poison (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-name your poison.ogg.

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