Growler is a slang term for a large can, pail, or jug of beer, often sold at breweries so that one can purchase beer in bulk and bring it home.
Searching around for the origin of this term, I've found a few different speculative theories.
The OED offers an attestation from 1888, but provides no etymology.
Wikipedia offers this theory:
It is claimed the sound that the carbon dioxide made when it escaped from the lid as the beer sloshed around sounded like a growl.
Green's Dictionary of Slang offers a few possible explanations, some of which overlap with the others outlined below.
ety. unknown; [perhaps from] the growling, grating noise of the can as it slid, full of beer, across the bar, or the ‘growling’ or grumbling of the children who were sent on the errand, or the drunken arguing that ensued among recipients of the liquor
This article in Thrillist has another possibility.
Although beer was once sold in pints, bartenders would fill a growler with nearly a quart of suds (aka two pints) because there weren't measurement standards in place yet. Often, bartenders and beer drinkers would argue about how much booze should be poured into the pail, and customers would sometimes whine about it like little dogs.
World Wide Words passes along this etymological thoery on the term:
To rush the growler was to take a container to the local bar to buy beer…
Gerald Cohen and Barry Popik argue on the basis of chase the duck that it and rush the growler evoke the image of a hunter sending his dog rushing to fetch downed prey, so that the growler in our expression is the dog. That slang term was then transferred to the can.
BeerNexus.com isn't afraid to offer a speculative theory:
maybe it was the rumble from the workman's hungry stomach at lunch just before the container was opened.
Question
All the theories I can find online seem to be a matter of pure speculation. Can any of these theories be supported or disputed with evidence or historical context? Are there any other possible origins of the term "growler?"
Best Answer
Early dictionary coverage of 'growler'
J.S. Farmer, Americanisms Old & New: A Dictionary of Words, Phrases and Colloquialisms (1889) has a note on "rush the growler," with a citation from 1888 that may be the OED's source:
Evidently the forced proximity of tender-aged children to demon lager explains the need for intervention by the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.
J.S. Farmer & W.E. Henley, Slang and Its Analogues Past and Present has a couple of additional notes on the phrase:
GROWER seems to be a typo for GROWLER in the parenthetical note above. It is interesting that Farmer & Henley identifies the receptacle as a pitcher and not a pail. Also noteworthy here is the attribution of the slang term to American workmen; this removes any probable connection between growler in "rush the growler" to the contemporaneous British slang term growler meaning "a four-wheeled cab" (a meaning that Farmer & Henley covers at some length).
J.M. Hart and other members of the Philological Society of Cincinnati [Ohio] include this brief entry for growler in "Notes from Cincinnati," in Dialect Notes, volume 1 (1890/1896):
The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia, volume 3 (1889) has this entry as sense 4 of growler:
Early popular discussions of 'growler', some of them illustrated
A fairly lengthy and useful discussion of the phrase appears in "Working the Growler" in Harper's Weekly (April 9, 1892):
A nice illustration accompanying the article shows a boy, pitcher in hands, working the growler.
Further confirmation that growler referred, at least initially, to a pitcher comes from Ernest Pierson, A Vagabond's Honor: A Romance (1889):
But a pitcher clearly wasn't the only possible receptacle to use in working or rushing the growler. From "The Blue Pencil Club," Judge's Serials number 5 (October 1888):
The accompanying illustration in this article shows what is unmistakably a tin pail.
From Wallace Peck, "The Two Growlers," in Life magazine (June 10, 1886):
The included illustration shows a puppy (the "pet growler of Gambrinus") asleep in an empty pitcher. A footnote after the quoted phrase "work the growler" says, "An A. D., 1886, slang expression more or less understood in lat. 41, long. 74." The poem suggests that pitchers were the preferred receptacle for beer transport, at least among topers of a certain class, much as many beer drinkers today prefer their drink to be sold in glass bottles rather than in aluminum cans.
From "His Prayer Answered," in [New York] Puck (June 22, 1887):
This is the same joke as in the Life magazine poem: growler as pitcher of beer is juxtaposed with growler as dog.
Lest I leave the impression that growler originally and unequivocally referred to a pitcher, I should emphasize that instances specifying a tin pail as a growler are also quite old. From "John Coppertug's Fall," in [New York] Puck (October 29, 1884):
And in a followup piece, "John Coppertug's " in [New York] Puck (November 5, 1884):
So if usage originally applied the term growler to pitchers, it very quickly (by 1884) expanded to apply also to tin pails.
Similarly, a tin pail appears in "The Growler Club," in Jingo (November 12, 1884):
The 'New York Sun' on 'growler' and 'working the growler', 1883–1884
Many of the earliest matches for growler that I've been able to find are from the New York Sun, a newspaper that ran at least eighteen articles related to the subject during the period 1883–1884. Here are seven of them.
From "A Row Over the Growler," in the [New York] Sun (June 18, 1883):
From "Lillis Accused of Murder," in the [New York] Sun (July 30, 1883):
From "Trying Heck for the Forsyth Street Murder," in the [New York] Sun (February 12, 1884):
From "Little Pint Pot Robbers," in the [New York] Sun (March 13, 1884):
From "Mayor Timken Aroused: Oceana Hose's Boys Have Blow Out, with Unlimited Quantities of Beer," in the [New York] Sun (May 29, 1884), quoting a communication to the Common Council from Mayor Timken of Hoboken, New Jersey:
From "Working the Growler," in the [New York] Sun (September 8, 1884):
From "Gang Rule in New York," in the [New York] Sun (September 15, 1884):
This last article repeatedly treats "working the growler" as a central activity of criminal gangs on New York City's east side. In most of its articles, the Sun makes every effort to treat using a growler as a particular practice of heavy public drinking by gang members who support their lifestyle with criminal activity. But it seems clear that a growler could also be used by an upstanding citizen to fetch a single measure of beer for private consumption.
Because the Sun's coverage has aspects of a crusader's devotion to exposing a virulent evil, it is difficult to know how unbiased the reporting was. Still, at the very least, the Sun deserves credit for making growler its readers couldn't fail to be familiar with by the end of 1884.
Other early instances of 'growler' in the relevant slang sense
A number of other instances of growler in its slang sense appear before 1888. Here are some of the ones I found, in chronological order.
The earliest match I found is something of a curiosity. It appears in a "Christmas Carol"-like piece of fiction titled "A Strange Land," in the [Grand Rapids, Wisconsin] Wood County Reporter (March 17, 1881), credited to "Zach Hickory," a narrator given to unexplained slang terms and phrases such as "boodle racket," "strike a picnic," and "I'm your oyster":
From "Rushing the Growler," in the Daily Wabash [Indiana] Express (October 4, 1884):
From an untitled item in the [Woodsfield, Ohio] Spirit of Democracy (November 25, 1884:
From Willim De Vere, "The Growler Club," in Wit, Humor, Pathos and Parodies (1885):
From the From "How Chicago Is Regenerated by High License," in The Reason: A Journal of Prohibition (March 1886):
From an analysis by F.W. Barrett of the cost of alcoholic beverages to U.S. consumers, reproduced in Ninth Annual Report of the Bureau of Statistics of Labor and Industries of New Jersey for the Year Ending October 31st, 1886 (1886):
Conclusions
Google Books and Elephind searches turn up instances of growler in the sense of "vessel for carrying a quantity of beer from a keg" from as early as 1881. The New York Sun's breathless coverage of "gangs" engaged in what sounds a lot like football stadium tailgate parties definitely spread awareness of the term growler and the expression "work the growler" to the newspaper-reading classes of New York City in 1883 and after.
The source of the term remains unknown. Many early sources attempted explanations based on convenient stories, but none of them seem very plausible. It is true that growler in a more or less literal sense shows up in the 1870s and 1880s as a synonym for "grumbler or malcontent"—but that isn't much to go on. Ultimately, the hypotheses that writers of the 1880s offer regarding the origin of the term are chiefly useful in confirming that from a very early date people didn't know why growler referred to an improvised receptacle for transporting beer.
The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, fifth edition (2011) asserts with unbounded confidence that
but it seems odd that not one of the dozens of references to growlers from the 1880s that I looked at mention the filled pails making any sound at all. Moreover, it is by no means clear that the earliest vessels that growler referred to were tin pails; Madelon Powers, Faces Along the Bar: Lore and Order in the Workingman's Saloon, 1870–1920 (1999) provides an excellent description of "the growler trade," and says that a growler was defined as
Most of those receptacles don't growl. I'm inclined to think that if there isn't an etymological connection between growler and an unidentified word from another language for a pitcher, pail, can or bucket, we may be dealing with a term whose source is unfindable.