firewater
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: 1.82 in modern English
15
Scrabble Score
9
Letters
3
Syllables
7
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
High-proof alcoholic beverage, especially whiskey (especially in the context of its sale to or consumption by Native Americans).
Countable; Informal; Uncountable
noun
High-temperature hydraulic condensate discharged from industrial boilers.
Countable; Uncountable
Example Sentences
- "High Jack had been drinking too much rum ever since we landed in Boca. You know how an Indian is—the palefaces fixed his clock when they introduced him to firewater."
- "Four polite Englishmen in their middle 20s, feigning like firewater drunks in a Eugene O'Neill play: it's exactly the stuff that makes their detractors groan."
- "A continuously circulated firewater line supplies a deluge cooling system in each gathering center for fire containment."
- "A break in a firewater line at BP Whiting Refinery caused water with an oil-like sheen to spread outside the refinery's walls along a section of Indianapolis Boulevard Tuesday night."
Etymology
A calque of a Native American language term, probably Ojibwe ishkodewaaboo (“alcohol”), from ishkodew- (“fire”) + -aaboo (“liquid”, glossed in older works as “water”). A number of other Algonquian, Siouan and Athabaskan languages also refer to whiskey with compounds that mean "fire-water" (on which basis noted Algonquianist Leonard Bloomfield even reconstructed a Proto-Algonquian word for it, *eškwete·wa·po·wi, although this cannot have existed). The motivation of the name is not entirely clear: It may refer to the “burning” feeling of ingesting high-proof alcohol, or to its flammability; alternatively, it may refer to how low-quality spirits also often included ingredients such as pepper, which burned. Non-alcohol-related senses are simply fire + water.