drink

Etymology 1

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”).

verb

1. (transitive, intransitive) To consume (a liquid) through the mouth.
   He drank the water I gave him.
   You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink.
2. (transitive, metonymically) To consume the liquid contained within (a bottle, glass, etc.).
   Jack drank the whole bottle by himself.
3. (intransitive) To consume alcoholic beverages.
   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.
   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
4. (transitive) To take in (a liquid), in any manner; to suck up; to absorb; to imbibe.
5. (transitive) To take in; to receive within one, through the senses; to inhale; to hear; to see.
6. (transitive, obsolete) To smoke, as tobacco.
   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

Etymology 2

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

noun

1. A beverage.
   I’d like another drink please.
2. (uncountable) Drinks in general; something to drink.
3. A type of beverage (usually mixed).
   My favourite drink is the White Russian.
4. A (served) alcoholic beverage.
   Can I buy you a drink?
5. The action of drinking, especially with the verbs take or have.
   He was about to take a drink from his root beer.
6. Alcoholic beverages in general.
   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
   […] 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. 14 November 2014, 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
7. A standard drink.
   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
8. (colloquial, with the) Any body of water.
   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, 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, 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, page 31
9. (Australia, figurative) A downpour; a cloudburst; a rainstorm; a deluge; a lot of rain.
   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]. 13 April 2023, 07:56 am (UTC+10/AEST), in News Breakfast, season 2023, episode 74, spoken by Nate Byrne, Melbourne, Australia: ABC News