← All sayings
Origin documented
“A wee dram”
What it means
A small measure of whisky.
Where it comes from
The dram is genuinely ambiguous. The apothecary fluid drachm is 3.55 millilitres, while the Scottish pub dram is a serving of 25 or 35, and the two differ by a factor of ten.
How sure are we?
Both descend from the Greek drachma, a coin weight that lent its name to units of mass and volume alike. Before the measures were fixed in law, a dram was simply whatever the host judged appropriate.