Other forms: drinking, drunk, drinks, drank
Drink is what you do with water, tea or juice: take it into your mouth and swallow. A glass of water by the bed, a coffee bolted before the train, a child drinking milk through a bent straw.
The verb is irregular: drink, drank, drunk. As a noun, a drink is either the liquid — a cold drink, soft drinks — or alcohol: come for a drink, he has a drink problem. Ask does she drink and English speakers hear the alcohol question and nothing else. Drink up means finish your glass, and to drink to someone is to raise yours in their honour. The person who has had too much is drunk, the offence is drink-driving in Britain and drunk driving in America, and drinking water is water clean enough to swallow.
1verbdrinkTo take liquid into the mouth and swallow it.~14%
“He drinks two litres of water a day and still complains of headaches.”
2verbconsumeTo consume alcohol, especially as a habit.~5%
“She does not drink, so she is driving us home.”
3nounquantityA quantity of liquid to be swallowed.~79%
“Can I get you a cold drink before we start?”
4nounalcoholAlcohol.~2%
“There was drink on the table and nobody was eating anything.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 21 sentences found in the wild and placed 21 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Drink has been itself since Old English drincan, which meant to drink and also to swallow up or engulf. Behind it stands Proto-Germanic *drinkaną and, possibly, a Proto-Indo-European root *dʰrenǵ- meaning to sip or gulp — to draw something into your mouth. German trinken is the same word, and Italian borrowed it as trincare.
Middle English
drinken
English, today
drink
Built from
From Middle English drinken. 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 include German trinken, Norwegian Bokmål drikke, and Italian trincare.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA