tipsy
Americanadjective
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slightly intoxicated or drunk.
-
characterized by or due to intoxication.
a tipsy lurch.
-
tipping, unsteady, or tilted, as if from intoxication.
adjective
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slightly drunk
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slightly tilted or tipped; askew
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Adjectives
Etymology
Origin of tipsy
1570–80; tip 2 or obsolete tip strong drink (perhaps back formation from tipple 1 ) + -sy. Compare obsolete bumpsy in same sense
Explanation
Use tipsy to describe a person who's just slightly drunk. If you've ever been to a wedding reception, you've probably seen a tipsy person. Your aunt who gets a little tipsy on New Year's Eve might giggle more than usual, for example. You can also describe an inanimate object as tipsy, if it's wobbly or unstable, or even a little crooked. Tipsy comes from tip and its meaning of "slope or overturn." The old-fashioned verb tipple, to drink alcohol, came later. In the 1800's, a "tipsy cake" was one soaked in alcohol.
Vocabulary lists containing tipsy
With the Fire on High
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Zeitoun
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
When frosting a cake, consider piping in swirls rather than straight lines for a tipsy Victorian look.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 26, 2026
It’s as if he’s saying to us and all the tipsy ladies in the audience: Check this out — LOL, right?
From Los Angeles Times ● Dec. 18, 2025
The veteran wine taster managed to avoid feeling tipsy by only drinking small sips or sometimes not swallowing the wine at all.
From BBC ● Apr. 23, 2024
And out of Erika Girardi’s tipsy mouth poured this gem at dinner: “Merce is in the purse.”
From New York Times ● Feb. 8, 2024
Matthias decided the peculiar hare was either slightly mad or tipsy, but his outmoded manner was certainly friendly.
From "Redwall" by Brian Jacques
The servants are growing tipsier downstairs, but the more afraid of the chief functionary every time he appears, frozen into sobriety by his glance.
From The Art of the Moving Picture by Lindsay, Vachel
Written in "implacable" 14-hour stretches during a four-month "retirement in the mountains of New Hampshire," Surrealist Painter Salvador Dali's Hidden Faces is the year's tipsiest first novel.
From Time Magazine Archive
It suddenly occurred to him, in one of those lucid moments which the tipsiest man will occasionally have, that the cemetery of Kirkcaldy formed a short cut to his house.
From Friend Mac Donald by O'Rell, Max
The tipsiest of his fellows slunk away from his side.
From The Shadow of a Crime A Cumbrian Romance by Caine, Hall, Sir
Beneath a most capricious sky lives the least capricious people in the world, and yet this orderly and methodical nation possesses the tipsiest, most disordered architecture that eye can see.
From Holland, v. 1 (of 2) by Zimmern, Helen
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
