Mind & EmotionGreek → English
Dipsomania
/ˌdɪpsəˈmeɪniə/noun
An old term for an uncontrollable craving for alcohol, arriving in bouts.
The Greek roots
δίψα
dípsa
thirst
μανία
manía
madness, frenzy
Literally: “thirst madness”
The story of the word
German medicine of the 1810s supplied the term, for a drinker who is not steadily drunk but taken by episodes. It lost its clinical standing after Magnus Huss put alcoholism into circulation in 1849, and now survives mostly in novels and in the clipped insult dipso. δίψα is still working in medicine through polydipsia, the raging thirst that is often the first sign of untreated diabetes.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → German scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 19th century
Same family
polydipsiakleptomaniamonomaniamania
In a sentence
The obituary called it dipsomania, which was the polite word in 1901.
Victorian fiction is full of dipsomaniacs who are sober for months at a stretch.