Skip to content
OneKitly

bourbon

nouncommon in dialogue

  • //ˈbɜː(ɹ).bən//
  • //ˈbʊə(ɹ).bən//
  • //ˈbɔː(ɹ).bən//

A whiskey distilled in the United States from a mixture of grains in which at least 51% is corn, aged in charred, new oak barrels.

noun

  1. 1

    A whiskey distilled in the United States from a mixture of grains in which at least 51% is corn, aged in charred, new oak barrels.

  2. 2

    A serving of bourbon whiskey.

    It concerns the gnomelike quality of the average American at a party. I have been to many parties where staid American business men have been transformed by a few ryes or bourbons into unpredictable gremlins out for adventure.

  3. 3

    A Bourbon biscuit.

Etymology

From bourbon whiskey, originally Bourbon whiskey, of disputed provenance. Generally taken to derive from Bourbon County, Kentucky, but possibly also from Bourbon Street in New Orleans, Louisiana. Both derive from the French Bourbon dynasty, named for the lordship of French Bourbon l'Archambault. The town's name derives from Borvo, a local Celtic deity associated with hot springs, from Proto-Celtic *borvo (“froth, foam”), from Proto-Indo-European *bʰrewh₁- (“to be hot, boil”). See also Borvo.

Forms

plural
bourbons
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).