alcohol

Three meanings in use today

1. Drinks that can make you drunk, taken together. Beer, wine and spirits. No plural in this sense.20The restaurant has no license to serve alcohol.
2. Ethanol, the chemical in those drinks. Formula C₂H₅OH.4This beer is 5% alcohol by volume.
3. Any organic compound with a hydroxyl group (–OH) on a carbon atom of an alkyl group. Countable, so chemists can say alcohols.20Methanol and glycerol are both alcohols.

In sentences

• She gave up alcohol for a year.
• The label says the mouthwash contains no alcohol.
• If the same salt shall be reduced into alcohol, as the chymists speak, or an impalpable powder, the particles and intercepted spaces will be extremely lessened. Robert Boyle, quoted by Samuel Johnson, 1755. Here it still means powder.6
• Sal volatile oleosum will coagulate the serum on account of the alcahol, or rectified spirit which it contains. John Arbuthnot, quoted by Johnson. Here it means spirit.6

Words people mix up with it

ethanol

The chemical name for the alcohol in drinks.4

methanol

A different alcohol, and acutely toxic. Being an alcohol in the chemical sense doesn’t make something drinkable.20

liquor

Merriam-Webster’s first listed synonym for the drink sense. In American use it usually points to distilled drinks like whiskey or gin.4

booze

The casual word for it, and older than alcohol in this sense: written by the 1570s, about two centuries before.3

Cambridge marks the drink sense as level A2, an early word for learners of English.20 Common phrases: alcohol by volume, rubbing alcohol, grain alcohol, isopropyl alcohol, sugar alcohol.4

Synonyms and antonyms for alcohol

Synonyms

• For the drinkliquor, booze, drink, alcoholic beverage, intoxicant.42930 Spirits is narrower: it covers distilled drinks only.30
• For the chemicalethanol, ethyl alcohol, grain alcohol.42930

Antonyms

English has no exact antonym for alcohol as a noun. Merriam-Webster’s thesaurus lists these near antonyms.31

• For drinkssoft drink, soda, mocktail, mixer, nonintoxicant

What the word meant, year by year

Dictionaries usually give you one date. The word has several, because its meaning moved. Drag the line and read what people wrote at the time.

How a powder word ended up in a bottle

Kohl was a very fine powder made by sublimation: heat a solid, collect what rises. People took it for the essence of the mineral.28 Distilling wine looks much the same, and what collects is the wine’s refined part.13 So the word stretched from a fine powder to “the pure spirit of anything”, liquids included.3 Alcohol of wine was then cut down to alcohol.3

How it traveled from Mesopotamia to London

1. guḫlumAkkadian, Mesopotamia. Antimony paste used as eye paint. Its own origin is unknown.9
2. kuḥlāAramaic, כוחלא. Comes from the Akkadian word.8
3. kuḥl, al-kuḥlArabic, كحل. Borrowed from Aramaic. Means kohl and stibnite, the antimony ore. Al- is simply “the”.83
4. kuḥūl, quḥūlAndalusian Arabic, the Arabic of medieval Spain.2
5. alcoholMedieval Latin, in medical and alchemical books, then Middle French or Spanish.2
6. alcofol, alchoholEnglish. Alcofol in the 1400s,3 alchohol in London in 1543.1

Stops mark where each language was used. Nobody documented a single journey, and the line is a picture of the word’s family tree. The Akkadian step comes from Wiktionary’s etymology, and we haven’t checked it against an Assyriology dictionary.

Why dictionaries disagree about its age

Look the word up in five places and you get five answers. Most of them are right, because each is dating something different.

One disagreement is real. Etymonline has the chemical class by 1808, and Wiktionary says after 1850. We haven’t seen the 1808 text, so we can’t settle it yet. Wikipedia also quotes the 1543 line in modern-looking spelling and credits it to Vigo. The page shows alchohol and fyne, in a glossary the translator added.1

In Egyptian pots, the powder is rarely what the dictionaries say

Dictionaries gloss the word as antimony ore. When chemists test the contents of ancient Egyptian kohl pots, they mostly find lead.

A 1999 study in Nature looked at cosmetics from about 2000 to 1200 BC, still in their original containers. It found the natural lead minerals galena and cerussite, and also laurionite and phosgenite, which the authors took to be made on purpose, by wet chemistry.10

The 2022 study analyzed 11 more containers from the Petrie Museum in London. Some of those held manganese or silicon compounds, and plant and animal ingredients turned up often, sometimes as the main part of the recipe.11

These pots are far older than Arabic kuḥl, so they don’t prove the antimony gloss wrong for medieval Arabic. They do show that kohl was never one recipe.

The “body-eating spirit” story

• The earliest uses are about powder. The 1543 entry says so,1 and for many centuries the word meant any fine powder.5 A word for a spirit wouldn’t begin there.
• They’re different Arabic words. Kuḥl starts with k and ghawl with gh. English ghoul is a real borrowing from Arabic, but it has no link to alcohol. Snopes rated the claim false in 2024.12
• The verse people cite, Qur’an 37:47, describes the drink of paradise: one modern translation reads “It will neither harm them, nor will they be intoxicated by it.”14 Ghawl stands in that verse for the harm. It isn’t a name for the drink. Wiktionary adds that the word was too poetic for medieval writers to have picked up, and that the link to antimony is well documented.2

A weaker version, without the body-eating, does appear in print. Scientific American reported it in 2016 and still called the kohl origin the more credible one, noting that it’s the origin the OED lists.13

The word, measured

Psychologists have asked thousands of people about tens of thousands of words. Here is where alcohol lands in six of those datasets.

Ratings come from panels of roughly 20 to 30 people per word, asked about the word out of context. Percentages are how alcohol ranks among the words in that dataset.

Its relatives, and a few impostors

kohl

The same Arabic word, borrowed a second time, for the original meaning. In English by 1799.192

alcoholic

An adjective from 1790. As a noun for a person, 1891.3

alcoholism

From Magnus Huss’s Alcoholismus chronicus, two volumes starting in 1849.15 Etymonline dates the Latin coinage to 1852 and the English word to 1882.3

ethanol

Coined after the 1892 Geneva conference on chemical names.1716

-ol

The chemists’ ending for an alcohol, as in cholesterol, renamed once the compound was found to be one.3

-aholic

The end of alcoholic, broken off for new words. Workaholic is first recorded in 1947.18

Impostors

Ghoul is unrelated.12 Alkali, alcove and algebra share only the Arabic word for “the”.

The eye powder in other languages

• alcoholSpanish
• alcoolFrench
• AlkoholGerman
• alcolItalian
• álcoolPortuguese
• alkolTurkish
• alkoholPolish
• alkoholiFinnish
• アルコールJapanese
• 알코올Korean
• แอลกอฮอล์Thai
• אַלְכּוֹהוֹלHebrew

By our count, 74 of the 93 languages in Wiktionary’s table for the chemical sense list a form of this word first.2 Others use a different root: Russian спирт, Greek οινόπνευμα, Mandarin 醇, Vietnamese rượu. Arabic’s own word for alcohol is كحول kuḥūl, from the same root.2

Three questions from this page

Where every claim comes from

We read the 1543 page, Johnson, Webster and the data files ourselves, and calculated the numbers on this page from those files. Everything else is credited to the source that says it. Checked on 5 November 2026. If something is wrong, write to hello@lexicist.com.

1. Traheron, Bartholomew, trans. The most excellent workes of chirurgerye, by Giovanni da Vigo. London, 1543. Glossary, first page. Wellcome Collection, public domain. Open the scan
2. Wiktionary, “alcohol”, English section. en.wiktionary.org/wiki/alcohol
3. Harper, Douglas. “alcohol”. Online Etymology Dictionary. etymonline.com/word/alcohol
4. Merriam-Webster, “alcohol”. merriam-webster.com/dictionary/alcohol
5. “Alcohol”. Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th ed., 1911, vol. 1, p. 525. On Wikisource
6. Johnson, Samuel. A Dictionary of the English Language. 1755. johnsonsdictionaryonline.com
7. Webster, Noah. An American Dictionary of the English Language. 1828. webstersdictionary1828.com
8. Wiktionary, “كحل”, Arabic section. en.wiktionary.org
9. Wiktionary, “guḫlum”, Akkadian, citing A Concise Dictionary of Akkadian. en.wiktionary.org
10. Walter, P., et al. “Making make-up in Ancient Egypt”. Nature 397 (1999): 483–484. doi.org/10.1038/17240
11. Riesmeier, M., et al. “Recipes of Ancient Egyptian kohls more diverse than previously thought”. Scientific Reports 12 (2022): 5932. doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-08669-0
12. Ibrahim, Nur. Fact check on the “body-eating spirit” claim. Snopes, 23 Feb. 2024, republished by Yahoo. Read it on Yahoo
13. Eplett, Layla. “A Spirited Debate”. Scientific American blog, 19 Oct. 2016. scientificamerican.com
14. Qur’an 37:47, trans. Mustafa Khattab, The Clear Quran. quran.com/37/47
15. Wikipedia, “Magnus Huss”. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnus_Huss
16. Armstrong, Henry E. “The International Conference on Chemical Nomenclature”. Nature 46 (1892): 56–59. doi.org/10.1038/046056c0
17. Wikipedia, “Ethanol”. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol
18. Merriam-Webster, “workaholic”. merriam-webster.com/dictionary/workaholic
19. Merriam-Webster, “kohl”. merriam-webster.com/dictionary/kohl
20. Cambridge Dictionary, “alcohol”. dictionary.cambridge.org
21. Brysbaert, M., et al. “Word prevalence norms for 62,000 English lemmas”. Behavior Research Methods 51 (2019): 467–479. doi.org/10.3758/s13428-018-1077-9
22. Kuperman, V., et al. “Age-of-acquisition ratings for 30,000 English words”. Behavior Research Methods 44 (2012): 978–990. doi.org/10.3758/s13428-012-0210-4
23. Brysbaert, M., et al. “Concreteness ratings for 40 thousand generally known English word lemmas”. Behavior Research Methods 46 (2014): 904–911. doi.org/10.3758/s13428-013-0403-5
24. Warriner, A. B., et al. “Norms of valence, arousal, and dominance for 13,915 English lemmas”. Behavior Research Methods 45 (2013): 1191–1207. doi.org/10.3758/s13428-012-0314-x
25. Lynott, D., et al. “The Lancaster Sensorimotor Norms”. Behavior Research Methods 52 (2020): 1271–1291. doi.org/10.3758/s13428-019-01316-z
26. Brysbaert, M., and B. New. “Moving beyond Kučera and Francis”. Behavior Research Methods 41 (2009): 977–990. doi.org/10.3758/BRM.41.4.977
27. Google Books Ngram Viewer, English 2019 corpus, 1700–2022, smoothing 3. Open the chart. Method: Michel, J.-B., et al. Science 331 (2011): 176–182. doi.org/10.1126/science.1199644
28. Wikipedia, “Alcohol (chemistry)”, Etymology, citing the OED Online. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_(chemistry)
29. Dictionary.com, “alcohol”, Etymology. dictionary.com/browse/alcohol
30. Wiktionary, “Thesaurus:alcoholic beverage”. en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Thesaurus:alcoholic_beverage
31. Merriam-Webster Thesaurus, “alcohol”, Antonyms & Near Antonyms. merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/alcohol

Image and audio credits

1543 page: Wellcome Collection, public domain. Kohl jar and tube: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, CC0. Stibnite: Ethmostigmus, CC BY-SA 4.0. Woodcut: Hieronymus Brunschwig, 1512, public domain. Recordings: Dvortygirl (US), CC BY-SA 3.0; Association Shtooka, Judith Franck (UK), CC BY 3.0, both via Wikimedia Commons. Map: Natural Earth, public domain.

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