Can "drink" be used as an uncountable noun?

Drink noun [C or U]

• alcoholic liquid:

  • Do we have time for a quick drink?
  • Whose turn is it to buy the drinks?
  • UK - We ran out of drink at the party.

(Cambridge Dictionary)

The "someone" you have been speaking to is RIGHT. The OED has numerous uncountable senses of the noun drink, some from as early as 888CE. In the English spoken in the United Kingdom you will hear He brought drink to the party used, every day of the week - well -er as often as there is a party, anyway. I am frankly astonished that it is rarely used as an uncountable noun in America.

Some of the senses are:

1.a. Liquid swallowed for assuaging thirst or taken into the system for nourishment. Also fig.

c1000 West Saxon Gospels: Matt. (Corpus Cambr.) xxv. 37 Þyrstendne & we ðe drinc sealdon.

c1220 Bestiary 206 Ðe godspel..is soule drink.

c1380 Wyclif Wks. (1880) 14 Þei ȝeuen not drenk to pore þristi men.

▸c1426 J. Audelay Poems (1931) 7 Þe þorste ȝif dryng.

1523 Ld. Berners tr. J. Froissart Cronycles I. xviii. 21 They dranke none other drynke, but the water of the ryuer.

1667 Milton Paradise Lost v. 344 For drink the Grape She crushes.

1875 B. Jowett tr. Plato Dialogues (ed. 2) III. 319 The thirsty one, in that he thirsts, desires only drink.

1.b. esp. as correlative to solid nourishment (meat, food, etc.). meat and drink: see meat n. 1.

examples from c950 but: 1855 T. B. Macaulay Hist. Eng. IV. 516 The crews had better food and drink than they had ever had before.

1c. transf. Liquid absorbed or drunk in.

1603 Shakespeare Hamlet iv. vii. 153 Till that her clothes, being heauy with their drinke, Dragg'd the sweete wretch to death.

1691 J. Evelyn Kalendarium Hortense (ed. 8) 136 If they [plants] shrivel and fold up, give them drink.

a1800 W. Cowper Yardley-Oak in W. Hayley Life & Posthumous Writings Cowper (1804) III. 414 The scoop'd rind [of the oak], that seems A huge throat calling to the clouds for drink.

3.a. Intoxicating alcoholic beverage. Hence in various phrases: Indulgence to excess in intoxicating liquor; habits of intemperance, drunkenness. in drink: intoxicated, drunk.

1042 Anglo-Saxon Chron. Her gefor Harðacnut swa þæt he æt his drinc stod.

c1340 Cursor M. (Trin.) 2942 Ȝyue we our fadir [Lot] ynowȝe of drinke.

1553 J. Brende tr. Q. Curtius Rufus Hist. viii. f. 151v, Hauing then his sences ouercome wyth drink.

1598 Shakespeare Henry IV, Pt. 1 ii. v. 419, I do not speake to thee in drinke.

a1616 Shakespeare Macbeth (1623) iii. vi. 13 The two delinquents..That were the Slaues of drinke.

1659 D. Pell Πελαγος 79 Take heed that your Sea-men see not the least appearance of drink in your eyes.

1887 H. R. Tedder in Dict. National Biogr. IX. 330/2 With advancing years Caulfield took to drink.

1890 W. Besant Demoniac iv. 46 Not a drop of drink of any kind shall be put on board that boat.

1894 H. Caine Manxman 284 Heaving into the hall like a man in drink.

1897 N.E.D. at Drink, Mod. Drink's doings.

4. The action or habit of drinking (to excess); a time or occasion of drinking. rare exc. in colloq. phr. on the drink. Cf. drunk adj.

1865 Reader No. 148. 495/1 He has been out on the drink.

1887 H. R. Haggard Jess ii. 16 Her brute of a husband was away on the drink and gamble.

1894 R. S. Ferguson Charters Carlisle xxx, There was a great drink in Carlisle that night.

6. colloq. (orig. U.S.). A river or body of water. big drink n. the Mississippi; the Atlantic; the sea. Always preceded by the.

examples from 1832 - the most recent being:

1960 L. Meynell Bandaberry xiv. 183 [He] had fished us out of the drink just, and only just, in time.

Articles are required only before discrete (countable) quantities. Drink is or can be a continuous quantity, like fish, sheep, grain, water, and anything else that can be measured and sold by weight or volume.

Some things are inherently continuous, like liquids and powders: he bought flour. Continuous things can be packaged. Packages are countable. He bought a bag [of flour]. The flour is continuous, but the sentence refers to the package, and "of flour" is a qualifier.

You can go to a wharf and buy fish. Whether you ought to pluralise depends on whether you wish to draw attention to individual fishes or treat them as a continuous quantity.

The last sentence is jarring because it switches from continuous to discrete. This is extremely poor style but unavoidable when comparing and contrasting the two.

If you buy a tonne of fish you will have it (the fish) delivered but if you buy two fishes for dinner you might have them wrapped separately.

If a golf player's shot ends up in a water hazard, the feat is sometimes referred to -- with a heavy undertone of exasperation -- as "the shot having found the drink".

To my English ears, most of the examples given acquire an Irish accent when I read them. I've frequently heard Irish friends say things like "He's a great one for the drink", so maybe it's more common among native Irish people.

Oscar Wilde (quoted by Malvolio) was Irish, and Father Jack famously used to just shout "Drink!"

I am a canadian who has lived in England for decades, and I can say with certainty that uncountable use of 'drink' is standard in England and sounds foreign in Canada. There are other countability or singlular/plural differences including 'on a tuesday' (GB) = 'on tuesdays' (Canada), and referring to companies in the plural (GB) vs singular (Canada).

Looking at the last half of the twentieth century in Google Ngram, it appears "bring drink" and "bring drinks" are similar in frequency in British English,

but the uncountable is less common in American English, with a notable exception for 1986 alone.

Like others, I've never heard "drink" used as an uncountable noun except when following "food and." The other examples given seem rare, highly specialized or colloquial, or anachronistic to the point where I'm inclined to say that in the U.S. (at least), "drink" is not uncountable save for a very small number of idiomatic exceptions. In other words, it's not "generally uncountable;" one wouldn't say "I'm thirsty; I could use some drink," or "Do you have any drink?"

From another angle... Just because we can say "The journey had its ups and downs" doesn't mean that we can excise one of the nouns joined by "and" and otherwise use the phrase in the same way, i.e., "The journey had its ups."