drunk as David's sow

English

Etymology

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)).

Pronunciation

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Adjective

drunk as David's sow (not comparable)

1. (simile) Thoroughly 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, drunk as an owl, drunk as Chloe, full as a goog, pissed as a fart, pissed as a newt, tight as a tick; see also Thesaurus:drunk