Definition of "usquebaugh" [us•que•baugh]

• Irish & Scots Whiskey. (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "Some authorities consider that the word is derived from the first part of the term usquebaugh; others suppose it to be derived from the name of a place, the Basque provinces, where some such compound was concocted in the fourteenth century."
• "Two hundred years later, the Catalan scholar Arnaud of Villanova dubbed the active principle of wine aqua vitae, the “water of life,” a term that lives on in Scandinavia (aquavit), in France (eau de vie), and in English: whisky is the anglicized version of the Gaelic for “water of life,” uisge beatha or usquebaugh, which is what Irish and Scots monks called their distilled barley beer."
• "Which English word is a shortened form of "usquebaugh", which English borrowed from Gaelic, meaning "water of life"?"