booze

• boose

Alteration of bowse.

• enPR: bo͞oz, IPA^(key): /buːz/

• Audio (General Australian):

  (file)

  Homophone: boos

• Rhymes: -uːz

booze (countable and uncountable, plural boozes)

1. (colloquial, uncountable) Any alcoholic beverage (especially beer or hard liquor).
   • 1953, Samuel Beckett, Watt, [Paris]: Olympia Press, →OCLC:

     The glutton castaway, the drunkard in the desert, the lecher in prison, they are the happy ones. To hunger, thirst, lust, every day afresh and every day in vain, after the old prog, the old booze, the old whores, that's the nearest we'll ever get to felicity, the new porch and the very latest garden.

   • 1995, Al Stewart, "Marion the Chatelaine" on Between the Wars

     She got caught between the shadows and the booze

     And she surely did know how to have the blues

   • 2025 February 2, Nadine Yousif, “Canadian fans boo US anthem as tariffs spur 'buy local' pledge”, in BBC News‎^[1]:

     In some Canadian provinces […] American booze will be pulled off the shelves indefinitely starting on Tuesday.

2. (colloquial, countable, archaic) A session of drinking alcohol; a drinking party.

• grog; see also Thesaurus:alcoholic beverage

• piss
• plonk

booze (third-person singular simple present boozes, present participle boozing, simple past and past participle boozed)

1. (slang, intransitive) To drink alcohol.

   We were out all night boozing until we dragged ourselves home hung over.

   • 1884, Hugh Reginald Haweis, My Musical Life:

     This is better than boozing in public houses.

2. (slang, transitive) To drink (an alcoholic beverage).
   • 1918, Norman Lindsay, The Magic Pudding, page 62:

     It's worse than kerosene to boose.

• outbooze