carouse

****************************************************************
Why settle for one word of the day? Browse through them
all by subscribing to Merriam-Webster Unabridged.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/cgi-bin/unabridged_sub.pl?refr=U_wod
****************************************************************

The Word of the Day for May 18 is:

carouse   \kuh-ROWZ ("OW" as in "cow")\   verb
     1 : to drink liquor freely or excessively
    *2 : to take part in a drunken revel : engage in dissolute behavior

Example sentence:
     When Dan got his first job after college, he soon learned that he couldn't 
carouse all weekend and be alert for work on Monday morning.

Did you know?
     Sixteenth-century English revelers toasting each other's health sometimes 
drank a brimming mug of spirits straight to the bottom -- drinking "all-out," 
they called it. German tipplers did the same and used the German expression for 
"all out" -- "gar aus." The French adopted the German term as "carous," using 
the adverb in their expression "boire (to drink) carous," and that phrase, with 
its idiomatic sense of "to empty the cup," led to "carrousse," a French noun 
meaning "a large draft of liquor." And that's where English speakers picked up 
"carouse" in the mid-1500s, first as a noun (which later took on the sense of a 
general "drinking bout"), and then as a verb meaning "to drink freely."

*Indicates the sense illustrated in the example sentence.