Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. A disorder characterized by the excessive consumption of and dependence on alcoholic beverages, leading to physical and psychological harm and impaired social and vocational functioning. Also called alcohol abuse, alcohol dependence.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. In pathology, the effects of excessive use of alcoholic drinks. They are distinguished as acute, resulting from the consumption of a large amount of alcoholic drink at once or within a short period, and chronic, resulting from its habitual consumption in smaller quantities.
Wiktionary
- n. pathology A chronic disease caused by addiction to alcohol, leading to a deterioration in health and social functioning.
- n. pathology Acute alcohol poisoning.
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. (Med.) A diseased condition of the system, brought about by the continued use of alcoholic liquors.
WordNet 3.0
- n. habitual intoxication; prolonged and excessive intake of alcoholic drinks leading to a breakdown in health and an addiction to alcohol such that abrupt deprivation leads to severe withdrawal symptoms
- n. an intense persistent desire to drink alcoholic beverages to excess
Examples
“My twenty-year career in alcoholism is a clichéd bore, but sober for most of sixteen years, I can live more intensely the ever-sordid hunger for booze that marks all classic noir.”
“The term alcoholism is understood to include all the changes that may occur in the human organism after the ingestion of any form of alcohol.”
“Professor Pearson attaches no strict meaning to the term alcoholism, by which he means anything from what the word really means down to a general suspicion that the parents were drinking more than was good for themselves or their home; and finally that in studying the influence of alcohol upon offspring Professor Pearson has omitted to enquire in a single case whether the alcoholism or the offspring came first.”
“This sense underlies the term alcoholism (addiction to alcohol).”
“ROBERTS: Dr. Pinsky, Representative Foley has checked himself into a facility to combat what he calls alcoholism and behavioral problems.”
“To equate abortion w/alcoholism is dishonest, mean-spirited and hypocritical.”
Think Progress » Focus on the Family to air a second ad during Super Bowl pre-game.
“And there's no blame about what happened because alcoholism is an illness.”
“Writing, like alcoholism, is a self diagnosed disease.”
“One of the symptoms of alcoholism is a difficulty accepting that one has the condition; this is called "denial.”
“In other words, alcoholism is NOT just a symptom or self-medication or something in between.”
Gladwell: cultural norms affect drinking! | Dr Vino's wine blog
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘alcoholism’.
-
bbc uk china vocab.
conservationists, estimate, threats, infertility, eating away at, endangered, furry, panel, in trouble, gongs, triumphed, caps and 1007 more...
-
Headlines & Newsmakers
frugality, environment, extinction, bible, killer, jazz, cloning, dead, god, moon, global warming, bailout and 340 more...
-
Psychology
stockholm syndrome, stereotype, ergonomics, human-computer in..., prejudice, neo-luddism, stress, trauma, psychopathology, psychotic, neurosis, depression and 180 more...
-
-ism
denoting an action, result, or quality; denoting a system or principle; denoting a peculiarity in language; denoting a condition
alcoholism, Americanism, feminism, barbarism, exorcism, baptism, anachronism, tourism, cannibalism, capitalism, journalism, totalitarianism and 9 more...
-
Diseases of excess use
First noticed by in in http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&d=TS18861020.2.4, "Theic" w...
vanillaism, theism, morphinism, caffeism, alcoholism, nicotinism, nicotism, caffeinism, listism, cocainism, bromism, chloralism and 3 more...
-
five syllables
ontogenesis, phylogenesis, concatenation, androgenesis, extra textual, inexorably, spagyrically, apophenia, iatrochemist, monocotyloid, morphological, parthenogenic and 998 more...
-
Unfortunately Necessary Words
Words we have to use all the time, but that doesn't mean they sound good. In fact, they kind of suck. See also this list.
milk, cheese, neck, teeth, moist, dry, skin, head, feet, mouth, frankly, hair and 97 more...
-
big book gre
abase, abbess, abbey, abbot, abdicate, abdomen, abdominal, abduction, abed, aberration, abet, abeyance and 6691 more...
-
addiction land
chocolate, love, marijuana, obsession, compulsion, excessive psychol..., alcoholism, nicotine addiction, workaholic, pornoholic, problem gambling, gaming addict and 17 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for alcoholism.
bilby "For Tony Adams to confess his alcoholism like that took a lot of bottle."
- soccer commentator and former player Ian Wright. Feb 16, 2009
dimã©lion i didn't know this word could be used metaphorically. Nov 22, 2008
chained_bear Kind of shocked this word hadn't been listed yet, but whatever...
"In a community lacking pure-water supplies, the closest thing to 'pure' fluid was alcohol. Whatever health risks were posed by beer (and later wine) in the early days of agrarian settlements were more than offset by alcohol's antibacterial properties.... Over generations, the gene pool of the first farmers became increasingly dominated by individuals who could drink beer on a regular basis. Most of the world's population today is made up of descendants of those early beer drinkers, and we have largely inherited their genetic tolerance for alcohol.... The descendants of hunter-gatherers—like many Native Americans or Australian Aborigines—were never forced through this genetic bottleneck, and so today they show disproportionate rates of alcoholism. The chronic drinking problem in Native American populations has been blamed on everything from the weak 'Indian constitution' to the humiliating abuses of the U.S. reservation system. But their alcohol intolerance most likely has another explanation: their ancestors didn't live in towns."
—Steven Johnson, The Ghost Map (New York: Penguin, 2006), 103–104 Oct 1, 2008