Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun A disease characterized by addiction to alcoholic beverages, often resulting in impaired social functioning and in damage to the liver, heart, and nervous system.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun In pathology, the effects of excessive use of alcoholic drinks.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun (Med.) A diseased condition of the system, brought about by the continued use of alcoholic liquors.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun pathology A chronic disease caused by addiction to
alcohol , leading to a deterioration in health and social functioning. - noun pathology Acute alcohol poisoning.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun 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
- noun an intense persistent desire to drink alcoholic beverages to excess
Etymologies
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Examples
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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.
December 2006 2006
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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.
New OA 2006
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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.
The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume 1: Aachen-Assize 1840-1916 1913
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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.
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This sense underlies the term alcoholism (addiction to alcohol).
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ROBERTS: Dr. Pinsky, Representative Foley has checked himself into a facility to combat what he calls alcoholism and behavioral problems.
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And there's no blame about what happened because alcoholism is an illness.
Lulu: My family values Nick McGrath 2010
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Writing, like alcoholism, is a self diagnosed disease.
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One of the symptoms of alcoholism is a difficulty accepting that one has the condition; this is called "denial."
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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. 2010
chained_bear commented on the word alcoholism
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
October 1, 2008
dimã©lion commented on the word alcoholism
i didn't know this word could be used metaphorically.
November 22, 2008
bilby commented on the word alcoholism
"For Tony Adams to confess his alcoholism like that took a lot of bottle."
- soccer commentator and former player Ian Wright.
February 16, 2009