Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun Raw, inferior liquor.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun Bad or adulterated liquor, injurious to the stomach and bowels; in the United States, specifically, whisky adulterated with deleterious substances to cheapen it while increasing its apparent strength.
  • Injurious and corrosive: said of bad liquor.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun Slang Bad small beer.
  • noun Slang Any bad spirituous liquor, especially when adulterated so as to be very deleterious.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun raw or poor quality alcoholic liquor

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun any alcoholic beverage of inferior quality

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

rot +‎ gut

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Examples

  • That doesn’t even do it well, because I’ve had some very good plonk, and rotgut is never good.

    I say pyjama… 2008

  • As long as they had somewhere they could peddle their hallucinogenic drugs, gamble their lives away and drown their sorrows in the kind of rotgut that'd leave their livers with the consistency of damp and mouldy Swiss cheese, they didn't care what the name of the damn place was.

    Vic's 2010

  • 'He has a place down here in a top loft, and has got two hundred and fifty barrels of "rotgut" whiskey.

    Edison, His Life and Inventions Frank Lewis Dyer 1905

  • "And to maintain cordial relations you deeded to them a fine but isolated farm where, uninterrupted, they could produce 'rotgut' to supply the entire Chicago area.

    David Lannarck, Midget An Adventure Story George S. Harney

  • Especially top quality hamburgers and tequila, not some sort of rotgut tequila and two-bit hamburgers made with supermarket green meat.

    General Lee Hamburgers and Tequila 2009

  • Nothing really made me go absolutely bonkers, but nothing was vile rotgut either.

    TasteCamp 2009

  • Same thing happens with whiskey – there are some real rotgut whiskeys out there with labels covered in medals.

    Medallurgy: wine competition gold is as good as chance | Dr Vino's wine blog 2009

  • Nothing really made me go absolutely bonkers, but nothing was vile rotgut either.

    The New York Cork Report: 2009

  • Especially top quality hamburgers and tequila, not some sort of rotgut tequila and two-bit hamburgers made with supermarket green meat.

    General Lee Hamburgers and Tequila 2009

  • Especially top quality hamburgers and tequila, not some sort of rotgut tequila and two-bit hamburgers made with supermarket green meat.

    General Lee Hamburgers and Tequila 2009

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