Green’s Dictionary of Slang

1. (also booze it up) to drink, to get drunk.

[1875		Jasper Wkly Courier (IN) 1 Oct. 6/2: Who — is — this ’ere crazy — galute? I heern tell he used to bouse up his own jib pretty taut].
1883		B.C. Truman Field of Honour 100: A dozen or more of his brother-cowboys were in town, and after the arduous duties incident to crowding twenty more steers into a car than the builders intended were over, the boys began to ‘booze up’.
1887		Cumberland Mercury (NSW) 15 Oct. 4/5: Jack Boozup having read Dr. Maclaurin’s suggestion that experiments should be made with a view of ascertaining the effect on the lower animals both of large doses of fusel oil and of small doses [...] he would be willing to act (or rather continue to act) as a lower animal [...] on condition that said doses are sufficiently diluted with beer.
1891		Dead Bird (Sydney) 17 Jan. 1/1: ’E painted Olympia scarlet, / And boozed up with jupiter too.
1895		Scribner’s XVII 635/1: Mac was dead leary of himself for awhile, an’ then began to booze up, an’ bimeby got fightin’ drunk.
1906		Wahpeton Times (Dakota, ND) 15 Nov. 3/2: Rugby has a bachelor who drives to town and allows his team to stand without food while he boozes up.
1929		K.S. Prichard Coonardoo 62: You’re not boozin’ up on my whisky.
1930		(con. 1914–18) ‘The Old Barbed Wire’ Brophy & Partridge Songs and Sl. of the British Soldier 72: He’s boozing up the privates’ rum / I’ve seen him, I’ve seen him.
1959		S. Bellow Henderson The Rain King 165: Why were my bones molten in those great cathedrals of France so that I couldn’t stand it and had to booze up and swear at Lily?
1968		G. Cuomo Among Thieves 119: He was up in Maynard, boozing it up with the Governor.
1968		on Frank Zappa ‘At The Gas Station’ [voiceover] [...] her and a girlfriend they get in there and booze it up and tear up the seats.
1974		C. Loken Come Monday Morning 10: He’d be out boozin’ it up too.
1981		A. Payne ‘You Need Hands’ Minder [TV script] 19: Always employ women these days, my old son. They work harder and they don’t booze it up.
1990		J. Wambaugh Golden Orange (1991) 30: Every time you’re tempted to booze it up.
2000		Guardian Rev. 21 Apr. 23: Holed up in an Okie camp [...] boozing it up in the most indescribable squalour.
2012		D. Spivey ‘If You Were Only White’ 265: Robert Mitchum had a long history of loving to booze it up.

2. (Aus.) to make someone else drink or drunk.

1882		Sydney Sl. Dict. (2 edn) 2: To Booze a Girl up, or a Loafer - To supply them with liquor.
1890		Dead Bird (Sydney) 10 May 2/3: She met a young swell who boozed her up well.
1902		Bulletin (Sydney) 6 Sept. 29/1: They listened while I skited of the things I learnt at sea; / Like crows upon a sheep that’s bogged, they settled down on me. / I boozed the toffy agent up, the swaggie an’ the sot; / For poor ole Bill, the sailor-man, was bullock for the lot.
1907		Sun. Times (Perth) 17 Feb. 4/7: Where’s the bloke wot was ere larst week? ’Im wot I boozed up when ’e promised to giv me son a column about ’ee’s ridin’?
1912		Bulletin (Sydney) 17 Oct. 47/2: That night we boozed up Rice considerably to show our appreciation of the girl he had got.