drunk as David's sow
"drunk-as-david-s-sow" is a 16-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“drunk as David's sow” is uncommon English (outside the top frequency list), classed as an adjective. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency English
- 20
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - Thoroughly drunk.
Corpus desk
Index EN-drunk-as-david-s-sow · drunk as David's sow · English
drunk as David's sow · unranked · 0 variants · 0 confusables
- FREQ-UNRANKED Unranked
- LEN-MEGA 20 letters
- VOW-5 5 vowels
- CONFUS-0 No pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-THIN "D" thin
- PHOTO-UNK Peer pending
Read with this headword: Spelling guide for this pattern
Desk codes from Wiktionary headword shape, FrequencyWords rank tier, confusable-pair count, generated misspelling depth, letter-cohort book size, and photo-finish peer. Not a difficulty grade.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | drunk as David's sow |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Adjective |
| Letters | 20 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Long-tail rank of “drunk as David's sow” in English
Rare enough to double-check
drunk as David's sow is uncommon English outside the top frequency list, classed as anadjective. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. Gloss: "Thoroughly drunk.".
The misspelling generator found no plausible variants for drunk as David's sow, since its letter pattern doesn't lend itself to common typo substitutions. Our dataset records no confusable match here, since nothing in our dataset looks or sounds close enough to cause mix-ups.
Etymologically, the entry records: 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 … The correct English form is drunk as David's sow, spelled D-R-U-N-K- -A-S- -D-A-V-I-D-'-S- -S-O-W.
Definition
- 1Thoroughly drunk.
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)).
Synonyms
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.