Meaning
A final alcoholic drink taken just before leaving a party, bar, or host's home. The phrase always refers to alcohol, and in modern usage it carries a wink of impropriety, since drinking immediately before driving is discouraged or illegal in many places. Informal and jocular; often said with self-aware irony about drinking before driving. Regional use: General English.
Origin
Despite sounding old-fashioned, the phrase is 20th century. A popular tale links it to condemned prisoners receiving a last drink on the way to London's Tyburn gallows, but historical records do not support that story. The 'for the road' element has 18th-century antecedents: travellers carried food and drink 'for the road', and an early printed example appears in The Beauties of All the Magazines Selected for 1763. The full phrase with 'one' meaning a drink first appears in print in the 1930s; The Phrase Finder cites the Edinburgh Evening News of August 1939, reporting a House of Commons exchange in which Lady Astor's disapproval of 'one for the road' was mentioned during a debate on alcohol and driving. The quotation marks in that report suggest the expression was not yet fully established.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- a quick one for the road
- have one for the road
- one more for the road
Usage Examples
- We ordered one for the road and then called a taxi.
- He raised his glass: 'Right, one for the road, then I really must go.'
- She declined a nightcap for the road, knowing the drive home was long.