drunk

1300–50; Middle English drunken, Old English druncen, past participle of drincan to drink

Both drunk and drunken are used as modifiers before nouns naming persons: a drunk customer; a drunken merrymaker. Only drunk occurs after a linking verb: He was not drunk, just jovial. The actor was drunk with success. The modifier drunk in legal language describes a person whose blood contains more than the legally allowed percentage of alcohol: Drunk drivers go to jail. Drunken, not drunk, is almost always the form used with nouns that do not name persons: drunken arrogance; a drunken free-for-all. In such uses it normally has the sense “pertaining to, caused by, or marked by intoxication.” Drunken is also idiomatic in such expressions as drunken bum. See also drink.

before 900; Middle English drinken, Old English drincan; cognate with Dutch drinken, German trinken, Gothic drinkan, Old Norse drekka

5. Drink, imbibe, sip refer to swallowing liquids. Drink is the general word: to drink coffee. Imbibe is formal in reference to actual drinking; it is used more often in the sense to absorb: to imbibe culture. Sip implies drinking little by little: to sip a cup of broth.

As with many verbs of the pattern sing, sang, sung and ring, rang, rung, there is some confusion about the forms for the past tense and past participle of drink. The historical reason for this confusion is that originally verbs of this class in Old English had a past-tense singular form in a but a past-tense plural form in u. Generally the form in a has leveled out to become the standard past-tense form: We drank our coffee. However, the past-tense form in u, though considered nonstandard, occurs often in speech: We drunk our coffee.
The standard and most frequent form of the past participle of drink in both speech and writing is drunk : Who has drunk all the milk? However, perhaps because of the association of drunk with intoxication, drank is widely used as a past participle in speech by educated persons and must be considered an alternate standard form: The tourists had drank their fill of the scenery. See also drunk.