the.com/three sheets to the wind
Drunk enough that the sentence you're saying stopped making sense two words ago.
means Extremely drunk — stumbling, slurring, unmoored from balance and coherence.
from From old sailing ships, where 'sheets' aren't sails but the ropes (or chains) that control a sail's angle to the wind. If one sheet came loose, the sail would flap and the ship would lurch unpredictably — if three worked loose, the vessel would stagger about with no control at all, lurching like a drunk. Sailors borrowed that image of a wobbling, uncontrollable ship to describe a wobbling, uncontrollable drunk, and the phrase sailed ashore into everyday speech.
- origin
- nautical term, not bedsheets at all
- sheets meant
- ropes controlling a ship's sails
- loose sheets
- flapping ropes made the ship stagger drunkenly
- one sheet
- means merely tipsy, not fully wrecked