One way to hold this word: a lot of loose liquid, moving fast, with nobody being careful about it. Tip a bucket over a yard and it runs across the stones and off the edge. Turn a glass in your hand and it slides round the sides. Open your throat and it goes straight down. In every case the liquid is in quantity, it is in motion, and it is being handled roughly rather than measured out — and that is what the word keeps coming back to.
From the word’s history
Wiktionary traces swill to Middle English swilen (to wash, to swirl, to wash away) and Old English swillan / swilian (to wash, wash down, gargle), and back to Proto-Indo-European *swel- (to drink, gulp, swallow), noting it is related to swallow. Washing and gulping are not two accidents here; the older word already held both.
依據 Wiktionary 的記載，swill 來自中古英語 swilen（沖洗、旋轉、沖走）和古英語 swillan／swilian（沖洗、沖掉、漱口），再往上是印歐字根 *swel-（喝、吞），並註明與 swallow 同源。也就是說，「用水沖」和「大口吞」在這個字裡不是兩件湊巧撞在一起的事，更早的字形本來就同時帶著這兩層。這也解釋了為什麼漱口——水在嘴裡沖、然後吞或吐——剛好站在兩邊中間。
Wiktionary (kaikki extract in evidence packet), source_ref kaikki:3f6f69a190036ae4:917058331 / :917078608
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