The Founding Father Who Catalogued 229 Ways to Say \"Hammered\"
Most people know Benjamin Franklin from the hundred-dollar bill or the kite-and-lightning experiment. Here is what fewer people know: in 1737, the man compiled 229 words and phrases for the state of being drunk, then published them in The Pennsylvania Gazette. Two hundred and twenty-nine. Not a typo. Not an exaggeration. You could spend an afternoon reading them all.
Where He Got Them
Franklin did not invent these words. He collected them. The dictionary was, in his own words, "gather'd wholly from the modern Tavern-Conversation of Tiplers."
Field research. The man went to taverns. He listened. He took notes. Then he published what he heard.
That is actually a remarkable thing for 1737. Franklin was treating everyday spoken language, the slang and slur of ordinary drinkers in colonial taverns, as something worth preserving. Most of what people said in those places was never written down. This was.
The Delicious Hypocrisy (Sort Of)
Here is where it gets good. Franklin prefaced the whole thing by stating that "Drunkenness is a very unfortunate Vice." Then he published 229 words for it.
The entries run from A to W. That is a lot of alphabet dedicated to a vice Franklin found unfortunate. One possibility is that he meant exactly what he said, and also found the language fascinating enough to document anyway. Another possibility is that Franklin understood something every good writer knows: you can disapprove of a thing and still be genuinely delighted by how humans talk about it.
Either way, you have to appreciate the commitment. That is not a quick column. That is a project.
What 229 Synonyms Actually Tells You
Here is a rule of thumb linguists love: a language develops many words for the things that matter most to its speakers. Inuit languages and snow. Legal Latin and property rights. And colonial Pennsylvania tavern culture, apparently, and the specific gradient between "had a few" and "completely incapacitated."
This is not a moral judgment. It is a vocabulary observation. The people Franklin was listening to had granular, specific, apparently memorable words for stages of drunkenness. They used this vocabulary often enough that Franklin could collect 229 examples just from listening to ordinary conversation.
The entries stop at W, by the way. X, Y, and Z do not appear. This could mean colonial drunk-talk simply did not produce words starting with those letters. Or it could mean Franklin ran out of column space. We do not know. But the cutoff at W is its own small linguistic puzzle, which feels appropriate for a word list this strange.
Why You Should Care About This
The Drinkers Dictionary is a snapshot of living language at a specific moment in time. Not the language of sermons or legal documents or formal correspondence. The actual language of people in taverns, talking the way people talk when nobody official is listening.
Except Franklin was listening. And he wrote it all down.
If you love words, the Drinkers Dictionary is proof that the most interesting vocabulary has always lived outside the formal dictionary. It lives where people actually talk. Franklin knew that in 1737. You already know it now, every time you add a new word to your mental Scrabble arsenal because you heard someone say it at a party.
Source: Languagehat