high lonesome n.
1. (US) a solo drinking spree.
![]() | On a Mexican Mustang, Through Texas 257: He was a cowboy, who, being on a ‘high lonesome,’ entered the saloon, and incontinently began discharging his six-shooter at the lamps and mirrors behind the bar. | |
![]() | (con. 1871) Seventy Years in Texas 111: Old Dad and Jim Day got on a high lonesome and started to paint the town red. | |
![]() | (con. 1870s) Triggernometry (1957) 59: The Sabine River they found ‘on a high lonesome,’ as the punchers say. | |
![]() | Wild Bunch (1960) 99: The boys had looked as if they were coming in to go on a high lonesome, and who knows what a man will say when he’s liquored up? |
2. attrib. use of sense 1.
![]() | Forty Modern Fables 93: So they went on a Toot of the High-Lonesome Variety. | |
![]() | Reader’s Digest Feb. 96/1: And they’re stacking the scenery behind at a high-lonesome pace [DA]. |
In phrases
to go out alone.
![]() | Indiana Lore 241: Hit the high lonesome—to depart, usually in haste; or to set out for an unknown destination. |