water drinker

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English

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Noun

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water drinker (plural water drinkers)

  1. Someone who drinks water, especially in preference to alcoholic drinks; a teetotaler. [from 15th c.]
    • 1789, James Boswell, edited by Danziger & Brady, Boswell: The Great Biographer, Yale, published 1989, page 21:
      Could not resist Metcalfe's fine dishes and wines. Sir Joshua began to be a water-drinker.
    • 2012, Jerry White, London in the Eighteenth Century, Bodley Head, published 2017, page 326:
      Ben Franklin, an American and a water drinker, found his fellow workers at Watts's printing house ‘great guzzlers of beer’ around 1725.
  2. (Christianity, obsolete) A member of an early Christian sect which drank water instead of wine during the Eucharist. [16th–19th c.]
  3. (now historical) Someone who drinks the waters at a spa. [from 17th c.]