Word.ws English Dictionary

squirrel whiskey

squirrel whiskey noun: high-proof, low-quality whiskey, generally produced illegally.

Noun

squirrel whiskey (uncountable)

  1. (Canada, US, obsolete, slang) High-proof, low-quality whiskey, generally produced illegally.
    • […] he slept of[f] his load of squirrel whiskey and went home forgetting a duty for which he was discharged.1891, “Letter to the editor”, in The Railway Conductor, volume 8, number 6, page 191
    • He left the yard and went down past the station, cutting across the tracks north of the water-tower, intending to drink squirrel whiskey in Luke Horton’s flour and feed store at the end of Main Street.1927, Morley Callaghan, “Amuck in the Bush”, in Morley Callaghan’s Stories, published 1959, page 83

Examples of squirrel whiskey in a sentence

  • There was no restraint as to the quality of liquor they sold, whether squirrel whiskey or moonshine, just so long as it provided the patrons with a kick.1960, James A. McRae, chapter 11, in Call Me Tomorrow, page 108:
  • I picked up a bottle of whiskey, a fine old Dundee, though it could have been a Chicago-saloon, two-bits-a-shot, squirrel whiskey for all either of us cared at that moment.2014, Robert Olen Butler, chapter 39, in The Empire of Night, page 252:

Synonyms of squirrel whiskey

Origin of squirrel whiskey

According to a widely repeated jocular explanation, “it [makes] those who [drink] it inclined to climb a tree,”; but the term is more plausibly explained by the fact that “squirrels were often drowned in the open-air mash-tubs used by moonshiners” and/or that the liquor was aged “by tying the keg in a tall pine tree”.

Questions about squirrel whiskey

What does squirrel whiskey mean?
Squirrel whiskey means high-proof, low-quality whiskey, generally produced illegally.
How do you use squirrel whiskey in a sentence?
There was no restraint as to the quality of liquor they sold, whether squirrel whiskey or moonshine, just so long as it provided the patrons with a kick.
What part of speech is squirrel whiskey?
Squirrel whiskey is a noun.

Words near squirrel whiskey in the dictionary

  1. Squirrel Mountain Valley
  2. squirrel tree frog
  3. squirrel tree frogs
  4. squirrel wheel
  5. squirrel wheels
  6. squirrel whiskey
  7. squirrel's cage
  8. squirrel-brain
  9. squirrel-cage motor
  10. squirrel-cage motors
  11. squirrel-proof

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: squirrel whiskey (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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Cite this entry: “squirrel whiskey.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/squirrel_whiskey. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.