An individual who suffers from alcoholism. Note that this noun has a different meaning from the adjective in alcoholic beverage.

A term of long-standing use and variable meaning, generally taken to refer to chronic continual drinking or periodic consumption of alcohol which is characterized by impaired control over drinking, frequent episodes of intoxication, and preoccupation with alcohol and the use of alcohol despite adverse consequences. The term alcoholism was originally coined in 1849 by Magnus Huss. Untill the 1940s it referred primarily to the physical consequences of long-term heavy drinking (beta alcoholism in Jellinek's typology). A narrower concept is of alcoholism as a disease (see alcoholism, disease concept of) marked by loss of control over drinking, caused by a pre-existing biological abnormality, and having a predictable progressive course. Later, the term was used by Jellinek and others to denote the consumption of alcohol leading to any type of harm (physical, psychological, or social; individual or societal). Jellinek subdivided alcoholism thus defined into a series of "species" designated by Greek letters (see Jellinek's typology). The inexactness of the term led a 1979 WHO Expert Committee* to disfavour it, preferring the narrower formulation of alcohol dependence syndrome as one among a wide range of alcohol-related problems. Alcoholism is not included as a diagnostic entity in ICD-IO (see dependence syndrome). Despite its ambiguous meaning, alcoholism is still widely employed as a diagnostic and descriptive term. For instance, in 1990 the American Society of Addiction Medicine defined alcoholism as "a primary, chronic disease with genetic, psychosocial, and environmental factors influencing its development and manifestations. The disease is often progressive and fatal. It is characterized by continuous or periodic: impaired control over drinking, preoccupation with the drug alcohol, use of alcohol despite adverse consequences, and distortions in thinking, most notably denial." Other formulations have split alcoholism into various types, some regarded as diseases and some not (see Jellinek's typology). Distinctions are made between essential alcoholism and reactive alcoholism, where "essential" indicates that alcoholism is not secondary to or precipitated by some other condition; between primary and secondary alcoholism, to indicate the order of onset in cases of dual diagnosis; and between Type I and Type II alcoholism, the latter having a male-linked, strongly genetic component. In older usage, dipsomania (episodic drinking) and alcohol addiction referred to loss-of-control drinking: inebriety also had a broader reference to habitual intoxication and its harmful effects.

* Problems related to alcohol consumption. Report of a WHO Expert Committee. Geneva. World Health Organization, 1980 (WHO Technical Report Series, No.650).

The belief that alcoholism is a condition of primary biological causation and predictable natural history, conforming to accepted definitions of a disease. They lay perspective of Alcoholics Anonymous (1939)-that alcoholism, characterized by the individual’s loss of control over drinking and thus over his or her life, was a "sickness"-was carried into the scholarly literature in the 1950s in the form of the disease concept of alcoholism. The concept was rooted in 19th-century medical and lay conceptions of inebriety as a disease. In 1977, a WHO Group of Investigators* responding to the loose and varying usage of alcoholism, proposed substituting the term alcohol dependence syndrome in psychiatric nosology. By analogy

*Edwards G et al. Alcohol-related disabilities. Geneva. World Health Organization, 1977 (WHO Offset Publication. No.32).1 with drug dependence, alcohol dependence has found general acceptance in current nosologies.