Wet one’s whistle

This phrase for taking a drink goes back to Middle English and appears twice in Chaucer. A somewhat similar phrase, wet the other eye, means “to take one drink right after another” and is traced by the Oxford Dictionary back to 1745. Still another British sense of wet, meaning simply “to drink intoxicating liquor,” goes still further back. The Oxford gives this remarkable example of its use in 1687: “He was as Drunk as a Chaplain of the Army upon wetting his commission.”