BYOB
acronym concerning alcohol
BYOB or BYO is an initialism and acronym concerning wine ("bring your own bottle"), liquor ("bring your own booze"), beer ("bring your own beer"), or marijuana ("bring your own bud").
BYOB is stated on an invitation to indicate that the host will not be providing alcohol, and that guests should bring their own. Some restaurants and business establishments (especially in areas where liquor licenses are difficult to obtain) allow patrons to bring their own bottle, sometimes subject to opening fees or membership conditions.
Etymology
Today, BYOB may mean "bring your own bottle" or "bring your own booze". BYOB is a later variant of the earlier expression, BYOL, meaning "bring your own liquor." The earliest known examples of BYOL appeared in two panels of a cartoon by Frank M. Spangler in the Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, Alabama), December 26, 1915, page 5. The joke was that a man received an invitation with the mysterious letters "BYOL" in place of RSVP. He looked up the initials in a "social directory" and learned that it stood for "Bring Your Own Liquor".
Other early examples of the expression appeared in newspapers in Alabama or stories relating to Alabama, suggesting that it may have originated there, perhaps coined by Spangler himself. At the time, Alabama had recently enacted a new statewide prohibition law prohibiting the sale, but not the consumption of alcohol, making it necessary to bring one's own alcohol.
A variant of BYOB is BYOS, meaning "bring your own sugar". This was used in England and the United States amid wartime rationing during World War I and again in World War II.
Shortly after passage of the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibiting the sale of alcohol nationwide, a joke about BYOL replacing RSVP on formal invitations began circulating in newspapers across the country.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “BYOB” is acronym concerning alcohol. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through BYOB, acronym and concerning, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1000774. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1915.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “BYOB” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.