Meanings
- not comparablesimileThoroughly drunk.
Synonyms: drunk as a cunt, drunk as a fiddler, drunk as a fiddler's bitch, drunk as a lord, drunk as a piper, drunk as a skunk, drunk as a sow, drunk as a wheelbarrow
Synonyms & antonyms
adjectiveThoroughly drunk.
Origin
Francis Grose, in his A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785), claims derivation from an instance in which a man named David Lloyd, who was accustomed to showing his six-legged sow as a curiosity, found his intoxicated wife where he expected the sow to be. Grose's dictionary was meant as a work of humour, and this story is almost certainly fanciful. Variants of the phrase predate it by over a century (see e.g. R. Monsey's Scarronides (1665) "As drunk as any Davids Sows" (p. 20)).
Full word history & related roots →Cite this entry
drunk as David's sow. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 5, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/drunk%20as%20David's%20sow
“drunk as David's sow.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/drunk%20as%20David's%20sow. Accessed November 5, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “drunk as David's sow,” accessed November 5, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/drunk%20as%20David's%20sow.
Source: drunk as David's sow on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.