the magazine
A comic magazine, one of the staples of British life since 1841 until its extinction in the 1990s. It was very radical at first, using its satire to crusade for social causes. Most of the time since it was more gently middle-class.

The founding editor was Mark Lemon. The name Punch was apparently given because someone suggested that like a bowl of punch it needed a touch of lemon. However, the very first cover used the famous images of Mr Punch and his dog Toby that were associated with it ever after. The original subtitle was The London Charivari.

Lemon died in 1870, and the editors after him have included Tom Taylor (1874-80; he wrote the play Lincoln was watching when he was shot), F.C. Burnand (from 1880 to 1906), Owen Seamen to 1932, E.V. Knox (Evoe) to 1949, the cartoonist Fougasse, Malcolm Muggeridge, William Rees-Mogg, and Alan Coren.

Most great British cartoonists contributed to Punch, notably Sir John Tenniel, Bateman and Fougasse; and writers with long associations with it included A.A. Milne, A.P. Herbert, and Douglas Jerrold.

The word cartoon itself, in the modern sense, comes from an early Punch drawing: a picture of visitors to an art gallery was given a caption beginning with the word "cartoon", which in art means a preliminary sketch. The name stuck for their humorous drawings. A number of famous Punch cartoons have passed into the language, like the curate's egg, "good in parts", and the two soldiers pinned down in a foxhole where one says to the other, "If you knows of a better 'ole, go to it!"

In its last few years Punch was dreadfully unfunny, and closed in 1992. There have been two attempts to relaunch it since 1996: first as an elegant glossy read, which was harmless enough, but not funny and therefore without purpose, and under the ownership of Mohammed al Fayed as a gadfly and scandalmonger more like Private Eye. In May 2002 Fayed announced he regretted he could no longer maintain it, and it would close again.


the drink
Webster is wrong again. Punch does not come from an Indian word for five. The English word is first recorded in this sense in the early 1600s. At this time it was pronounced with the ordinary u vowel of the time, as in put. Subsequently this changed (except in the north of England) to its present value, which is like the a vowel in Hindi panc 'five'. The association is natural using modern pronunciations, and was first made in the late 1600s, but cannot be correct.

The English word (or the phrase bowl of punch) was borrowed into several European languages early on, and these forms all confirm the pronunciation with u. Full details may be found in the OED.

Most dictionaries mention the supposed etymology from 'five', because the story is established, but with a qualifier like 'supposedly' or 'traditionally', since they have't room enough to explain in detail why it isn't true.