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Poteen is strong Irish spirit — a kind of whiskey — made at home in secret, without paying tax on it. For hundreds of years it was made in the Irish countryside in small hidden stills, often at night and far from roads, because the government taxed legal whiskey heavily and the makers had no wish to pay. Selling it was illegal, and buying it too, though everybody in the district knew who had it. The drink itself is clear, not brown, because it does not sit in a wooden barrel for years the way legal whiskey does. It is very strong and it has a rough reputation — there are plenty of stories about bad poteen made and the harm it did. Today the picture has . Ireland made licensed poteen legal to sell in the 1990s, so you can now buy bottles labelled poitín in a shop, and it has become a small piece of national heritage rather than a crime. But the word still carries the smell of the old days: secret, rural, slightly dangerous, romantic. Irish songs and stories are full of it. You will see it spelled both ways: poteen is the English spelling, poitín the Irish one, and bottles usually use the Irish. It is a mass noun — 'some poteen', 'a glass of poteen'. Roughly: pot-CHEEN.
愛爾蘭私釀烈酒（可以想成愛爾蘭版的「私釀酒／米酒頭」，未繳稅、偷偷做的）
組成From the Irish poitín, meaning 'little pot' — pota (pot) plus -ín, the Irish ending for making something small, like our -let in booklet. It is named after the small pot still it was made in: small so you could hide it, and carry it away fast if the tax men came.
原始詞典資料2 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，原文照列，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
poteennoun/pəˈtiːn/
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Illegally produced Irish whiskey; moonshine.
- The Irish peasantry practice the distillation of that illicit spirituous liquor, so well known by the name of poteen whiskey, with a most unaccountable infatuation.
- [A] detachment, consisting of a subaltern’s party, was on its road to Head Quarters, from a still hunting in the mountains, or hostile excursion after contrabandists, or distillers of that delicious fluid, Potheen whiskey, […] It is related that when he [George IV of the United Kingdom] had drained the first glass that was presented to him, he declared that he could now understand why the Irish peasantry were willing to risk life and liberty in its illegal production—it was the real elixir vitæ—the only stuff fit to fuddle a prince with—royal in its flavor, royal in its odor, and super-royal in its effects! That Poteen!
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An unlicensed drinking establishment selling illegally produced Irish whiskey.
- Kildrumferton … Pop. 9,687 […] There are nine licensed public houses; poteens many more. Illicit distillation prevails to a very great extent, the district being rarely visited by the revenue police, not indeed for years past; the presence of the excise officer in a neighbouring town is the only check.
- The whisky shops and poteens of Scotland and Ireland, the gin-palaces and beer-shops of England, are an incubus that is dwarfing the good in every section of the community, and forcing out the evil.
資料來源：英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary（CC BY-SA 4.0）。 原文照列，未經改寫。