The word for today is…

carouse (verb) – To drink large amounts of alcohol, especially in boisterous merrymaking.

Source : The Free Dictionary

Etymology : Sixteenth-century English revelers toasting each other’s health sometimes drank a brimming mug of spirits straight to the bottom—drinking “all-out,” they called it. German tipplers did the same and used the German expression for “all out”—gar aus. The French adopted the German term as carous, using the adverb in their expression boire carous (“to drink all out”), and that phrase, with its idiomatic sense of “to empty the cup,” led to carrousse, a French noun meaning “a large draft of liquor.” And that’s where English speakers picked up carouse in the 1500s, first as a noun (which later took on the sense of a general “drunken revel”), and then as a verb meaning “to drink freely.”

Peter is a fourth-generation New Zealander, with his mother's and father's folks having arrived in New Zealand in the 1870s. He lives in Lower Hutt with his wife, some cats and assorted computers. His...