Hangover

Podcast 1 · Introduction

Hangover

A documentary-style narration: origin, meaning, and feel.

Part of speech

noun

Pronunciation

HANG-oh-vuh  /ˈhæŋəʊvə/

Definition

The unpleasant physical effects — headache, nausea, fatigue, and thirst — felt the morning after drinking excess alcohol; something that remains or survives from a previous era.

Plain meaning

A hangover is the morning-after suffering caused by drinking too much alcohol: the headache, nausea, thirst, and exhaustion. Extended, a hangover is anything that persists uncomfortably from a previous time — the legal hangover of colonial law, the cultural hangover of a previous era.

Register

Informal in the alcohol sense. The metaphorical hangover — a hangover from the colonial period, a Cold War hangover — is used in more formal writing and journalism to describe persistent legacies of past eras.