1. A drinker of water, one who drinks water in preference to wine or other liquors; now usually spec. a total abstainer.
c. 1440. Promp. Parv., 518/2. Water drynkare, aquebibus.
1546. J. Heywood, Prov., II. v. (1867), 59. A falser water drinker there liueth not.
1599. B. Jonson, Cynthia’s Rev., I. iv. 1. What! the wel-dieted Amorphus become a water-drinker?
1638. T. Whitaker, Blood of Grape, 31. When as water or small-beere-drinkers looke like Apes rather then men.
1765. Sterne, Tr. Shandy, VIII. v. A water-drinker, provided he is a professed one, and does it without fraud or covin, is precisely in the same predicament.
1815. Wordsw., Poems, Pref. ad fin. Though myself a water-drinker, I cannot resist the pleasure of transcribing what follows.
1882. F. M. Crawford, Mr. Isaacs, 7. A water-drinker in India is always a phenomenon.
† b. In the early Christian Church, an epithet applied to those who in the celebration of the Sacrament used water instead of wine. Obs.
1562. [T. Cooper], Answ. Def. Truth, viii. 59. Cyprian wrate against those that were called Aquarij. waterdrinkers.
2. One who drinks the ‘waters’ at a spa.
1707. Jos. Browne (title), An Account of the Wonderful Cures Perform’d by the Cold Baths, With Advice to the Water Drinkers at Tunbridge, Hampstead,… and all the other Chalibeate Spaws.
1837. Dickens, Pickw., xxxvi. A golden inscription [in the pump-room], to which all the water-drinkers should attend.
1889. Gretton, Memory’s Harkback, 188. It was great fun to see the troop of water-drinkers in the early morning marching up and down … each with an empty wine-glass in hand, which from time to time they got replenished, according to the dose of mineral water prescribed for them.
