Drinker

How to spell drinker

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce drinker

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does drinker mean?

1. nounA person who drinks something, especially one who regularly consumes alcohol or a particular beverage.

Drinker in a sentence

• As a lifelong tea drinker, she kept the kettle running all day.

• The clinic offers support for any heavy drinker trying to cut back.

Where does drinker come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word is built from the native English verb 'drink', which goes back to Old English 'drincan', meaning to swallow water or another liquid. That verb has solidly Germanic roots, with close cousins in Old Norse 'drekka', Dutch 'drinken' and German 'trinken', all carrying the same basic sense of taking liquid into the body. The agent ending '-er', also from Old English, simply turns the verb into a noun for the person doing the action, so a 'drinker' is literally 'one who drinks'. By the medieval period the word had already narrowed in many contexts to describe someone who habitually consumes alcohol, a sense that still sits alongside the plain meaning today. The spelling is reassuringly regular: the only point of care is keeping the single consonants and the familiar '-nker' cluster intact.

How the word is built

• drink (Old English drincan: to swallow liquid)
• -er (agent suffix: one who does)