drink

He drank the water I gave him.

You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink.

[…] There liues ſhee with the bleſſed Gods in bliſſe: / There drinks the Nectar with Ambroſia mixt […]

1579, Immeritô [pseudonym; Edmund Spenser], “Nouember. Ægloga Vndecima.”, in The Shepheardes Calender: […], London: […] Iohn Wolfe for Iohn Harrison the yonger, […], →OCLC, folio 47, recto:

It was he who proposed the bowl of punch, which was brewed and drunk in Mrs. Betty’s room, and which Gumbo concocted with exquisite skill.

1857–1858, W[illiam] M[akepeace] Thackeray, The Virginians. A Tale of the Last Century, volume I, London: Bradbury & Evans, […], published 1858, →OCLC, page 283:

That the young Mr. Churchills liked—but they did not like him coming round of an evening and drinking weak whisky-and-water while he held forth on railway debentures and corporation loans. Mr. Barrett, however, by fawning and flattery, seemed to be able to make not only Mrs. Churchill but everyone else do what he desired.

1918, W[illiam] B[abington] Maxwell, chapter II, in The Mirror and the Lamp, Indianapolis, Ind.: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, →OCLC:

(transitive, intransitive) To consume (a liquid) through the mouth.

Jack drank the whole bottle by himself.

(transitive, metonymically) To consume the liquid contained within (a bottle, glass, etc.).

You've been drinking, haven't you?

No thanks, I don't drink.

Everyone who is drinking is drinking, but not everyone who is drinking is drinking.

I drink to the general joy of the whole table, / And to our dear friend Banquo.

c. 1606 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Tragedie of Macbeth”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act III, scene iv]:

Bolingbroke always spoke freely when he had drunk freely.

1852, William Makepeace Thackeray, The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. […] , volume (please specify |volume=I to III), London: […] Smith, Elder, & Company, […], →OCLC:

The waiter came up, and I ordered a Coke for her—she didn't drink—and a Scotch and soda for myself, but the sonuvabitch wouldn't bring me one, so I had a Coke, too.

1951, J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown and Company, →OCLC, page 168:

You don't know how to drink. Your whole generation, you drink for the wrong reasons. My generation, we drink because it's good, because it feels better than unbuttoning your collar, because we deserve it. We drink because it's what men do.

2007, Matthew Weiner, “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes”, in Mad Men, season 1, episode 1, spoken by Roger Sterling:

(intransitive) To consume alcoholic beverages.

Let the purple violets drink the stream.

1697, Virgil, “The Fourth Book of the Georgics”, in John Dryden, transl., The Works of Virgil: Containing His Pastorals, Georgics, and Æneis. […], London: […] Jacob Tonson, […], →OCLC:

(transitive) To take in (a liquid), in any manner; to suck up; to absorb; to imbibe.

My ears have not yet drunk a hundred words / Of that tongue's utterance.

c. 1591–1595 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Tragedie of Romeo and Ivliet”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act II, scene ii]:

1717, Alexander Pope, “Eloisa to Abelard”, in The Works of Mr. Alexander Pope, volume (please specify |volume=I or II), London: […] W[illiam] Bowyer, for Bernard Lintot, […], published 1717, →OCLC:

to drink the cooler air

1850, [Alfred, Lord Tennyson], In Memoriam, London: Edward Moxon, […], →OCLC, (please specify |part=Prologue or Rpilogue, or |canto=I to CXXIX):

(transitive) To take in; to receive within one, through the senses; to inhale; to hear; to see.

(transitive) To toast (someone or something) with a drink; to drink to.

And some men now live ninety yeeres and past, / Who never dranke tobacco first nor last.

1630, John Taylor, A Proclomation or approbation from the King of execration, to euery nation, for Tobaccoes propogration:

(transitive, obsolete) To smoke, as tobacco.

en-verb

drink (third-person singular simple present drinks, present participle drinking, simple past drank or (southern US) drunk or (nonstandard) drinked, past participle drunk or (chiefly archaic) drunken or (dialectal) drank or (all nonstandard, archaic or obsolete) drinked or drinken or dranken)

drinks (present singular third-person)
drinking (participle present)
drank (past)
drunk (Southern US past)
drinked (nonstandard past)
drunk (participle past)
drunken (archaic participle past)
drank (dialectal participle past)
drinked (archaic nonstandard obsolete participle past)
drinken (archaic nonstandard obsolete participle past)
dranken (archaic nonstandard obsolete participle past)

Belizean Creole: jrink

desc

Chinese Pidgin English: drinkee, dlinkee

Sranan Tongo: dringi

Aukan: diingi

Saramaccan: diíngi

Tok Pisin: dringim

→ Esperanto: drinki

→ Ido: drinkar

From Middle English drinken, from Old English drincan (“to drink, swallow up, engulf”), from Proto-West Germanic *drinkan, from Proto-Germanic *drinkaną (“to drink”), of uncertain origin; possibly from Proto-Indo-European *dʰrenǵ- (“to draw into one's mouth, sip, gulp”), nasalised variant of *dʰreǵ- (“to draw, glide”).
Cognates
Cognate with West Frisian drinke (“to drink”), Low German drinken (“to drink”), Dutch drinken (“to drink”), German trinken (“to drink”), Danish and Norwegian Bokmål drikke (“to drink”), Norwegian Nynorsk drikka (“to drink”).


drink

I’d like another drink please.

For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink

1611, The Holy Bible, […] (King James Version), London: […] Robert Barker, […], →OCLC, Matthew 25:35:

(uncountable) Drinks in general; something to drink.

My favourite drink is the White Russian.

Can I buy you a drink?

He was about to take a drink from his root beer.

The action of drinking, especially with the verbs take or have.

She mixed furniture with the same fatal profligacy as she mixed drinks, and this outrageous contact between things which were intended by Nature to be kept poles apart gave her an inexpressible thrill.

1935, George Goodchild, chapter 1, in Death on the Centre Court:

The face of work is a drunk man in the same chair, chewing on the same bone for five thousand nights. The face of work is a, coffee cup in hand, frustrated: "You don't get it. They all don't get it. You don't understand, man." Daddy's on the drink again.

1995, “Daddy's on the Drink” (track 12), in Shame-Based Man, performed by Bruce McCulloch:

[…] she was indeed Amanda in the flesh: a doughty chatterbox from Ohio who adopted the manner of a Southern belle and eschewed both drink and sex to the greatest extent possible.

2014 November 14, Blake Bailey, “'Tennessee Williams,' by John Lahr [print version: Theatrical victory of art over life, International New York Times, 18 November 2014, p. 13]”, in The New York Times:

A drink of wine is about 5 ounces

And when (SUBJECT) was 55, would you say (he/she) drank more than, less than, or about 2 to 3 drinks a day?

1963, Vital and Health Statistics: Programs and collection procedures, page 125:

If he doesn't pay off the mafia, he’ll wear cement shoes to the bottom of the drink!

When in mid-Channel the speed slowed and I was informed by A.C. Russell that another dinghy had been spotted. This turned out to contain a Canadian fighter pilot who had been in the drink for three days and was in rather a bad way. He said he had seen all the aircraft flying over in the two days before D-Day and since, but no one had sighted him.

1996, John French+, A Drop in the Ocean: Dramatic Accounts of Aircrew Saved From the Sea, Pen and Sword, →ISBN, page 99:

In seconds, we went from sitting in a boat to threading ice-cold water. I wasn't wearing a life jacket and am not the best paddler, but there I was, in the drink, splashing around.

2011, Levi Johnston, Deer in the Headlights: My Life in Sarah Palin's Crosshairs, Simon and Schuster, →ISBN, page 34:

If the planes couldn't make it, they would go in the drink, eject their rubber lifeboats, inflate them, climb in, and pray for the Navy to pick them up before the Germans did.

2012, Jack R. Myers, Shot at and Missed: Recollections of a World War II Bombardier, University of Oklahoma Press, →ISBN, page 31:

(colloquial, with the) Any body of water.

Now this is going to bring some huge totals of rainfall with it—200 to 400 millimetres with it—and along with that, these winds—gusts to 275 kilometres an hour near the cyclone [Cyclone Ilsa] core—and that's a real concern. That's very destructive winds and it's going to carry this inertia and the rain with it well inland. And we're likely going to be talking about a cyclone all the way through Friday as it slowly weakens, eventually washing that moisture out into a front going through the south. It means the southeast is getting a drink but W.A.'s northwest really copping it, individual totals significantly higher than what you're seeing here [on the weather map].

2023 April 13, 07:56 am (UTC+10/AEST), in News Breakfast, season 2023, episode 74, spoken by Nate Byrne, Melbourne, Australia: ABC News:

(Australia, figurative) A downpour; a cloudburst; a rainstorm; a deluge; a lot of rain.

en-noun

drink (countable and uncountable, plural drinks)

Tok Pisin: dring

→ Czech: drink

→ Danish: drink

→ Dutch: drink

→ Finnish: drinkki

→ French: drink

→ German: Drink

→ Italian: drink

→ Japanese: ドリンク (dorinku)

→ Polish: drink

→ Portuguese: drinque, drink

→ Swedish: drink

drink (mainly apéritif drinks, both alcoholic and non-alcoholic, when served in bars or pubs)

potus

"the drink"- colloquially, any body of water

From Middle English drink, drinke (also as drinche, drunch), from Old English drynċ, from Proto-Germanic *drunkiz, *drankiz. Compare Dutch drank.