I heard this phrase the other day on the television program Dirty Sexy Money.

I knew what it meant — staggering drunk — but wasn’t sure about its origin, so I searched Google for “three sheets to the wind” (with the quotation marks, to avoid variations) and got about 70,500 matches.

According to one source, a “sheet” is a rope for securing a ship’s sail, not the sail itself. A “square-rigged” ship uses three ropes or sheets to tie a sail to the ship. If all three sheets are loose and therefore blowing in the wind, then the sail will be loose, causing the ship to go off course, just like a drunken sailor.

According to many articles, such as at World Wide Words, Pierce Egan in his 1821 work Real Life in London was the first to record the phrase “three sheets in the wind”.

This phrase has morphed since then to the much more popular “three sheets to the wind”.