Other forms: drunks
Drunk means unable to think or move properly after too much alcohol. Get drunk, blind drunk, drunk driving.
English has an extraordinary number of words for it — some hundreds have been collected — which says something about the culture. Drunk is the standard word; drunken is used before a noun, as in a drunken argument. As a noun a drunk is somebody habitually so. Note drunk in charge, the British legal phrasing; and that drunk is the past participle of drink.
1adjectivedrunkUnable to think or move properly after too much alcohol.~98%
“He was too drunk to drive, so his friends called him a taxi.”
2nounhabituallySomebody habitually drunk.~2%
“The old drunk slept on a bench outside the station every night.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 11 sentences found in the wild and placed 10 of them on a sense (1 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
drunk is a state of intoxication.
Old English druncen is the past participle of drincan, to drink. Drunk and drunken are the same participle, which is why one goes before the noun and one after the verb.
Proto-Germanic
*drunkanaz
Old English
druncen
Middle English
drunke
English, today
drunk
Built from
From Middle English drunke, drunken, ydrunke, ydrunken, from Old English druncen, ġedruncen (“drunk”), from Proto-Germanic drunkanaz, gadrunkanaz (“drunk; drunken”), past participle of Proto-Germanic drinkaną (“to drink”). Cognate with stq dronken, West Frisian dronken, Dutch dronken, gedronken, German Low German drunken, bedrunken, German trunken, getrunken, betrunken, Swedish drucken, Icelandic drukkinn.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA