We’ve all been three sheets to the wind on occasion, right? Or is that just me? You know, those times when you go out for a quiet drink, only to find yourself drunk, piddled, rat-arsed, sloshed, tired and emotional? Yeah, those times.

Random fact of the day: it’s believed that ‘drunk’ is the English word with the most synonyms – or drunkonyms. As recorded in Paul Dickson’s Drunk: The Definitive Drinker’s Dictionary, it has a staggering (pun absolutely intended) 2985 synonyms. Of all of them, ‘three sheets to the wind’ is an old English favourite. But where does it come from?

It’s actually nautical in origin, like many British idioms. In old seafaring terms, a sheet doesn’t refer to the sail as you might expect but to the ropes – sometimes chains – that hold the sails in place. Many masts had three sheets per mast, which could be loosened or tightened according to the wind’s strength. If it got windy, they’d loosen the sheets to fill the sails with air and drive them on.

Now imagine, if you will, a blustering day aboard ship, with all three sheets loosened and waves knocking you this way and that. You might find yourself staggering across deck, trying to find your footing (I know I would!) Now imagine a bunch of drunks trying to get from one end of the ship to the other. It would be much the same, right? (Just like how your bedroom floor goes all topsy turvy after a few bevvies.) Likewise, as the boat pitched and rolled, it could be said to be lurching like a drunken sailor.

One of the earliest recorded written examples of this idiom comes from Pierce Egan’s Real Life in London in 1821:

Old Wax and Bristles is about three sheets in the wind.

My favourite discovery during my research, though, is that sailors often had a sliding scale of drunkenness all to do with sheets (see this great article on Phrase Finder). If you were just a bit tipsy, then perhaps you were one sheet to the wind, a single little rope flapping in the breeze. Three sheets, though, as we say today, meant falling over yourself fried, wastered, plastered, loaded, and juiced up.

In Catherine Ward’s 1824 novel, The Fisher’s Daugher, she says:

Wolf replenished his glass at the request of Mr. Blust, who, instead of being one sheet in the wind, was likely to get to three before he took his departure.

Now we’ve got that all sorted, who fancies a beer?

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