[f. LIME sb.2] The juice of the lime used as a beverage and as an antiscorbutic.
1704. Lond. Gaz., No. 4074/4. A Parcel of extraordinary good Rum and Lime-juice, to be sold.
1853. Kane, Grinnell Exp., xxxvi. (1856), 326. Three times a day did these high-spirited fellows drink a wine glass of olive-oil and lime-juice.
1854. Act 17 & 18 Vict., c. 104 § 224. The master of every such Ship … shall serve out the Lime or Lemon Juice … and Sugar and Vinegar to the Crew, whenever they have consumed Salt Provisions for Ten Days.
1859. Cornwallis, New World, I. 49. Some that had not yet ‘got the lime juice off them,’ i. e. unmistakable new chums.
b. attrib. in lime-juice writing, writing with lime-juice as a sympathetic ink.
1877. Owen, Surv. Wellesley’s Adminstr., 43, in Desp. [He] may seem, by a sort of lime-juice writing, to have invalidated much which he does not repudiate.
Hence Lime-juicer. a. Australian. One who has lately made the voyage from England; a ‘new chum’ (cf. quot. 1859 under prec.). b. U.S., a British sailor or ship, so called because in the British navy the consumption of lime-juice is enforced (as an antiscorbutic). c. An advocate of the use of lime-juice.
1856. Charleston Daily Courier, 19 Feb., 2/2. It is feared that he has fallen into the hands of the ‘lime-juicers,’ who have shipped him for parts unknown.
1859. Cornwallis, New World, I. 58. Turn that lime-juicer out.
1884. Pall Mall Gaz., 26 Aug., 11/1. They would not go on a ‘lime-juicer,’ they said, for anything.
1891. C. Creighton, Hist. Epidemics, I. 596. Hawkins, it will have been remarked, was no bigoted ‘lime-juicer.’
