Marked by restraint especially in the eating of food or drinking of alcohol.
Abstemious and "abstain" look alike, and both have meanings involving self-restraint or self-denial. Both get their start from the Latin prefix abs-, meaning "from" or "away," but "abstain" traces to "abs-" plus the Latin verb tenēre (meaning "to hold"), while "abstemious" gets its "-temious" from a suffix akin to the Latin noun temetum, meaning "intoxicating drink."
From Dictionary.com:
c.1600, from Latin abstemius "sober, temperate," from ab(s)- "from" (see ab-) + stem of temetum "strong drink," related to temulentus "drunken." Technically, of liquor, but extended in Latin to temperance in living generally.
NB from Vocabulary.com:
This word has the vowels a, e, i, o and u in alphabetical order; the adverb abstemiously adds the y.
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