The British have 546 ‘drunkonyms’ or words for drunkenness according to a new academic study. We could not resist seeing how the Microsoft Word handles them (after we’ve had a quick drink to get us going š)
We compiled a list of 55 drunkonyms and ran them past the Word 365 spell checker using UK, US and Aussie English variants. The results where largely what you’d expect but with a few surprises.
Our list of 55 words was compiled from various articles about the academic paper by Prof Christina Sanchez-Stockhammer in theĀ Yearbook of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association. That paper has the full list of 546 drunkoymns.
WARNING: some of these common phrases might offend … NSFW.
Drunkonyms in UK and Australian English
We were surprised that ‘sozzled‘ is in the dictionary and so is ‘ar*****led‘. The latter didn’t even raise an ‘offensive word’ warning from Word’s style checks.
In US English
The results are a little different in the US English dictionary. ‘ar*****led‘ now gets a red squiggly line but not ‘schnokered’. ‘squiffed’ is OK but ‘squiffy’ is not (the reverse of the UK English results).
That’s just the single words for drunkeness that we quickly found. Not forgetting the phrases or euphemisms that abound. Two of our favorites:
“Tired and emotional” made famous by Private Eye magazine.
“an advanced state of refreshment”
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