Word.ws English Dictionary

on the dry

on the dry prepositional phrase: temporarily refraining from drinking alcohol.

Prepositional phrase

  1. (Ireland, UK, idiomatic, informal) temporarily refraining from drinking alcohol
    • I bumped into an old mate of mine, Bill, the other day whom I was banged up with in 1972 in St Bernard's Hospital. He's on the dry now but he told me he has had several lapses since we left muttering that it was all going to be different tomorrow.1985 August 24, Jeffrey Bernard, “Low life: High and dry”, in The Spectator, page 34
    • Then, maybe two weeks before cameras rolled, he'd put the blinkers on again and totally focus on it, and that included staying off the booze. 'I'm on the dry,' he'd announce.2013, Robert Sellers, “A Date with Cronenburg”, in What Fresh Lunacy is This?: The Authorized Biography of Oliver Reed, Little, Brown Book Group, →ISBN, page 175

Questions about on the dry

What does on the dry mean?
On the dry means temporarily refraining from drinking alcohol.
What part of speech is on the dry?
On the dry is a prepositional phrase.

Words near on the dry in the dictionary

  1. on the dot
  2. on the double
  3. on the down-low
  4. on the downlow
  5. on the drum
  6. on the dry
  7. on the earie
  8. on the edge
  9. on the edge of
  10. on the edge of one's seat
  11. on the face of

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: on the dry (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-on the dry.ogg.

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