Etymology

hooch

H4O1O1C3H4

Today it means: An alcoholic beverage, especially an inferior or illicit one and especially liquor such as whisky. Full definition →

Tlingit Xutsnoowú Ḵwáan
Ask AI about its historyChatGPTClaudePerplexityGoogle AIGrok

hooch · noun1

  1. Tlingit · derived fromxóots“grizzly bear”
  2. Tlingit · derived fromXutsnoowú Ḵwáan
  3. English todayhooch

Abbreviation of hoochinoo, name of a specific liquor, from Tlingit Xutsnoowú Ḵwáan, the group that produced it, from Hutsnuwu (“grizzly bear fort”), the name of the village on Admiralty Island in which they lived. From Tlingit xóots (“grizzly bear”).

hooch · noun2

First attested in the 1950s, probably borrowed from Japanese 家(うち) (uchi, “house”), especially the dialectal form with an initial h- used on the Ryukyu islands where many American soldiers were based.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.