1. Chronic alcohol abuse, dependence, or addiction; chronic excessive drinking of alcoholic beverages: Alcoholism results in impairment of health and/or social or occupational functioning, and increasing adaptation to the effects of alcohol requiring increasing doses to achieve and sustain a desired effect. Specific signs and symptoms of withdrawal usually are shown when one stops such drinking.
2. "Alcohol dependence" (currently the preferred term); "alcohol addiction": The terms refer to a variety of disorders associated with alcoholism, the repetitive consumption of alcohol, usually over a long period of time, in amounts that the drinker is unable to handle physiologically, emotionally, or socially.

In lexicolmedy, bourbonic plague: At college, the consumption of distilled whiskey became a kind of endemic among the students, and some students joked about it as being a case of alcoholism