Standard drink
measure of the volume of pure ethanol in an alcoholic beverage
A standard drink or (in the UK) unit of alcohol is a measure of alcohol consumption representing a fixed amount of pure alcohol. The notion is used in relation to recommendations about alcohol consumption and its relative risks to health. It helps to inform alcohol users.
A hypothetical alcoholic beverage sized to one standard drink varies in volume depending on the alcohol concentration of the beverage (for example, a standard drink of spirits takes up much less space than a standard drink of beer), but it always contains the same amount of alcohol and therefore produces the same amount of intoxication. Many government health guidelines specify low to high risk amounts in units of grams of pure alcohol per day, week, or single occasion. These government guidelines often illustrate these amounts as standard drinks of various beverages, with their serving sizes indicated. Although used for the same purpose, the definition of a standard drink varies very widely from country to country.
Labeling beverages with the equivalent number of standard drinks is common in some countries.
Definitions in various countries
The definition of what constitutes a standard drink varies very widely between countries, with what each country defines as the amount of pure alcohol in a standard drink ranging from 8 to 20 grams (10 to 25 ml).
The sample questionnaire form for the World Health Organization's Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test (AUDIT) uses 10 g (0.35 oz), and this definition has been adopted by more countries than any other amount.
“Standard drink” enters the record as measure of the volume of pure ethanol in an alcoholic beverage. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Standard, drink and measure can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Standard drink” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Standard, drink and measure provides the most credible route into that argument.
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 Feb 3, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1899871. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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 “Standard drink” 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.