Quoth the OED: “One who topes or drinks a great deal; a hard drinker; a drunkard. Now chiefly literary.”
Hals’s relentless jolliness isn’t confined to his genre scenes of rollicking topers… (Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker, August 8, 2011)
Quoth the OED: “One who topes or drinks a great deal; a hard drinker; a drunkard. Now chiefly literary.”
Hals’s relentless jolliness isn’t confined to his genre scenes of rollicking topers… (Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker, August 8, 2011)
notoneoffbritishisms.com 
I would change “chiefly” to “only.” I’ve never heard it spoken; only read it.
Have I missed something? One quotation from 100 years ago? I’ve never heard/seen the word on either side of the Atlantic!
My mistake–I dated it as 1911 when it was really 2011 (now corrected). I always love a good New Yorker Britishism, especially an archaic one.
As a Brit, I must say that this is a word that I have never heard of before…
British writers often use archaic words and constructions they would never say. Don’t know why, yea, verily.