Swizzle

//ˈswɪzəl// noun, verb, slang

noun, verb, slang ·Moderate ·College level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    Any of various kinds of alcoholic drink. countable, uncountable

    "“We brought tiki drinks.” “Oh.” “Tracy, turn loose that rum swizzle.” “Oh, Bill's back, and he's brought tiki drinks! You got a friend in me, Bill.”"

  2. 2
    any of various tall frothy mixed drinks made usually of rum and lime juice and sugar shaken with ice wordnet
  3. 3
    Alternative form of switchel (“drink based on water and vinegar”). alt-of, alternative, countable, uncountable
  4. 4
    Synonym of swizz (“swindle, disappointment”). UK, countable, informal, uncountable

    "“Coo! What a swizzle!” Relief at their safe deliverance was mingled with disappointment that the spider was not a rare specimen after all."

Verb
  1. 1
    To stir or mix. informal, transitive

    "She swizzled the milk into her coffee."

  2. 2
    To drink; to swill. informal, transitive

    "I checked it all over after Mona got in, while you were swizzling beer in that saloon."

  3. 3
    To permute bits, or elements of a vector.
  4. 4
    To convert portable symbols or positions to memory-dependent pointers during deserialization. transitive
  5. 5
    To change a class's dispatch table in order to resolve messages from an existing selector to a new implementation. transitive

    "If you or a loved one want to implement method swizzling, you may want to consider using a fairly well-tested wrapper package, such as JRSwizzle. Apple may reject applications that appear to use method swizzling in a dangerous way."

Synonyms

All synonyms
stir upswizz

Example

More examples

"“We brought tiki drinks.” “Oh.” “Tracy, turn loose that rum swizzle.” “Oh, Bill's back, and he's brought tiki drinks! You got a friend in me, Bill.”"

Etymology

Unknown etymology, 1813. Original sense “alcoholic drink”, possibly a variant of switchel (“a drink of molasses and water, often mixed with rum”), attested 1790, itself of uncertain origin. Possibly influenced by swirl or fizz. In verb sense “to stir”, from swizzle stick (“stick for stirring alcoholic drinks”), itself attested 1859.

Related phrases

swizzle stick

More for "swizzle"

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.