verb. (old: now colloquial).—To drink: spec. to drink hard. Hence TOPER = a confirmed tippler, a SOAKER (q.v.); TO TOPE IT ABOUT = to keep the bottle going briskly (B. E. and GROSE).

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  1675.  COTTON, Burlesque upon Burlesque: or, The Scoffer Scofft, ‘Juno and Jupiter,’ 191.

        A sturdy piece of Flesh, and proper,
A merry Grig, and a true TOPER.

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  d. 1680.  BUTLER, Epigram, ‘On Club of Sots.’ The jolly members of a TOPING club.

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  1688.  DRYDEN, To Sir Geo. Etherege, 59.

        Now if you TOPE in form, and treat,
’Tis the sour sauce to the sweet meat,
The fine you pay for being great.

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  1694.  MOTTEUX, Rabelais, V. xxii. They TOPED … cool sparkling … syrup; which went down like mother’s milk. Ibid., xlii. Oh! that … we gentlemen TOPERS had but necks some three cubits long.

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  1765.  TUCKER, The Light of Nature Pursued, I. I. v. Sits among his fellow TOPERS at the two-penny club.

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  d. 1796.  BURNS [The Merry Muses (c. 1800), 118], ‘Tweedmouth Town.’

        Three wives,
Who … often met to TOPE an’ chat,
  An’ tell odd tales of men.

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  d. 1845.  HOOD, Don’t You Smell Fire?

          Was there ever so thirsty an elf?—
But he still may TOPE on.

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  1877.  BESANT and RICE, This Son of Vulcan, Prol. i. In the public houses … the TOPERS … keep [New Year’s Eve] as they keep every feast … by making it a day more than usually unholy.

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