What’s the difference between drunk and drunken? If you dig through the linguistic corpora, or collections of texts, you’ll find that we celebrate with drunken revelry and break into drunken brawls, but individuals drive drunk and or get visibly drunk. Typically, drunken is used for a situation, and drunk refers to a person. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Drunk vs. Drunken”
Hello, you have a way with the words.
Hi, Grant. How are you?
Great. Who is this?
This is Lance from Ames, Iowa.
Ames, Iowa. Welcome to the show, Lance.
Hi, Lance.
Well, I am an ESL teacher here at Iowa State University.
All right.
On Monday, one of my students came in and said,
Teacher, today I can no-give homework because this weekend I was very drunken.
And after the class laughed, we turned it into a teachable moment.
Good.
But I got stuck on drunk versus drunken.
I lived in Korea for about seven years, and my students there also said drunken.
I understand that that’s an adjective, but I don’t understand how to teach students the difference between drunk and drunken.
Very interesting.
Drunk versus drunken.
Drunk versus drunken.
Yeah. Well, my sense is that those two words mean slightly different things.
When they’re adjectives.
Yes, when they’re functioning as adjectives.
Because drunken is only in adjectives, but drunk can be part of a verb form, a noun, or an adjective.
Yeah. And the word drunk generally means intoxicated, and it’s usually the predicate adjective.
He was drunk. Your student was drunk, right?
Yeah.
Drunken often means more characterized by lots of drinking or a habitual state.
So you might talk about a drunken party or a drunken orgy or something like that.
Right.
There’s kind of a way to get to the bottom of what the native speaker thinks about these two adjectives.
And we’ll just leave the noun and verb out of it for now.
And what you can do, and you’ve heard us talk about this on the show before, is look at the corpora.
These are large bodies of text where they take all this text in and they assign parts of speech to every word.
And then you can analyze according to parts of speech to see what company the words keep.
And so I’ve done this now for drunken drunken.
And so here’s kind of what I found out.
We celebrate in drunken revelry rather than drunk revelry.
We wouldn’t say drunk revelry.
We do it in a drunken haze, not a drunk haze.
We have drunken brawls, drunken debauchery, drunken sailors, drunken stupor, drunken rage, and drunk louts.
We wouldn’t have drunken louts.
And this is what people most commonly do.
There’s a couple other things.
We get legally drunk, not legally drunken.
We drive drunk.
We don’t drive drunken.
And we are visibly drunk more than we’re visibly drunken.
And so it’s just interesting that you find in people’s written behavior where they’ve,
And some of this is edited text, so perhaps it’s gone through a copy editor
Kind of conformed to a more standard way of writing.
But you can see here, by and large, there’s some very cleared patterns here
That drunk and drunken keep different company.
So drunken refers less often to people then.
It’s about a situation or a condition or a behavior.
Yeah, that’s what I was trying to say.
And drunk is more often about a person.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It’s really interesting.
That would be easy to explain to them because a lot of things in English happen.
You know, it changes based on behavior versus person.
We have a lot of people like you, Lance, who teach English to people who don’t speak it as a first language.
And what I would recommend is that you Google BYU Corpus.
That’s BYU as in Brigham Young University Corpus.
And you’re going to come to a free page where there are giant texts, giant databases,
That you can do the kind of analysis that I just did to get to the bottom of these questions for yourself.
Yeah, we use the COCA.
Yes, that’s it. There we go.
The COCA of Contemporary American English.
Yes, that will work as well.
We use that and teach it in our advanced levels, but this is kind of an intermediate level.
But it can help answer that question.
It’s probably something you don’t want to have your intermediate students do for themselves,
But you could do that for them and just show them the results, kind of like figure out what the difference is there.
Dictionaries don’t tend to provide this information.
There’s no dictionary that I know that would tell you the difference between drunk and drunk,
And they’d probably just call them synonyms.
Well, thank you very much.
Thanks for calling, Lance.
Really appreciate it.
Yeah, thank you.
Have a great day.
Okay, bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Email words@waywordradio.org.
