Meanings
- simileEngorged with food or drink, especially alcoholic drink.
Bragg describes his mother Margaret as a girl eating her first hot dog: it "came wrapped in wax paper, the bun warm and soft, the smell of raw onions, spicy meat and chili filling the car, and she rode the rest of the way full as a tick, mustard on her cheeks."
2001 Sep. 2, Robert Morgan, "Down Home" (book review of Ava's Man by Rick Bragg), New York Times (retrieved 10 Dec 2012)2 more examples
Then we drank up all the beer, and threw the bottles into the water and fired at them. . . . "Stop ut!" shouted Mulvaney. "Whin you've fired into nothin' as often as me, over a better man than yoursilf, you will not make a mock av thim orders. 'Tis worse than whistlin' the Dead March in barricks. An' you full as a tick, an' the sun cool, an' all an' all!"
1890, Rudyard Kipling, “The Madness of Private Ortheris”, in Indian Tales[B]etween that Dutch cattle salesman and the barkeeper and myself, it would have taken a bookkeeper to have kept a check on the drinks we consumed. . . . Well, I took a seat for a shine, and for two hours I sat there as full as a tick, and as dignified as a judge on the bench.
1904, Andy Adams, chapter 5, in A Texas MatchmakerSynonyms: full as a goog, full to the gills, stuffed
Synonyms & antonyms
adjectiveEngorged with food or drink, especially alcoholic drink.
Cite this entry
full as a tick. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 5, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/full%20as%20a%20tick
“full as a tick.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/full%20as%20a%20tick. Accessed November 5, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “full as a tick,” accessed November 5, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/full%20as%20a%20tick.
Source: full as a tick on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.