a drunken revel: a wild, noisy party of eating, drinking, and street carousing
For a first-century Greek reader the word named a particular scene, not a vague vice. After a formal drinking-party broke up, young men would pour into the streets at night, wearing garlands and carrying torches, led by a flute-player, singing and dancing, sometimes crashing another house, sometimes ending in a brawl. The word grew out of the worship of the wine-god Dionysus, and it kept that festive, half-religious coloring for centuries.
By the time of the New Testament it had turned sharply negative. Greek-speaking Jewish writers used it as shorthand for the whole world of pagan festival: drunken procession, music, sexual license, and idol-worship rolled into one. All three New Testament writers who use it drop it into a list of vices right next to drunkenness, naming it as one of the marks of pagan life that followers of Jesus are meant to leave behind.
The word rarely travels alone. It stands beside "drunkenness" (μέθη) in every occurrence, and in Peter's list it sits next to "drinking-parties" (πότος) and builds toward "lawless idol-worship." Scholars debate how much of the old pagan-religious flavor is still alive in these lists: most read Paul's use in Romans and Galatians as generalized moral language, while many hear the cultic overtones freshly reawakened in 1 Peter 4:3, where the word stands one step away from idolatry.