sot
/sɒt
/noun
A habitual drunkard.A few nifty lighting tricks later, and we're riding the rails with a host of yin-yang character pairs: the suited businessman and his wayward brother, the heartbroken sot and her vivacious new friend, and so on....
- But repeated references to drunkenness in the plays, plus the portraits of two sots, Sir Toby Belch and Falstaff, lead Greenblatt to suspect alcoholism.
- Maudling was clever, lazy, a sot and deeply corrupt.
verb (sots, sotting, sotted) [no object] archaic
Drink alcohol habitually: the few reckless vagabonds with whom he sotted in the alehouse
Derivatives
sottish
- In Fields's 1940 masterpiece The Bank Dick, the comedian is Egbert Sousé - a sottish curmudgeon who, through no effort of his own, becomes a hero for thwarting a bank robbery.’
- Clearly contrived on the cheap and in haste, this production, since closed, turned ‘the Scottish play’ into a skittish play, and, worse yet, a sottish play.
Origin
Late Old English sott 'foolish person', from medieval Latin sottus, reinforced by Old French sot 'foolish'. The current sense of the noun dates from the late 16th century.