Tuesday, December 5, 2017

Interesting words: Bibulous

Bibulous is an adjective that, according to Merriam Webster, means:


1 : highly absorbent
2 a : fond of alcoholic beverages
b : of, relating to, or marked by the consumption of alcoholic beverages

I admit to never having seen the first usage, it seems to mainly be used in medical literature.

It's been used in English for quite a while; according to the Online Etymology Dictionary it was first used in the 1670s and comes from Latin bibulous meaning "drinking readily". It's a pretty rare word, occurring just 1 in about 24,000,000 words per Ngram viewer (for instance, "drunk" occurs once in every 90,000 words) but I think it's highly useful.




(image from By Achim Raschka (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons)

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