bottle

Meanings

1. 1
   noun

   A container, usually made of glass or plastic with a narrow neck, used for holding liquids.

   She bought a bottle of water at the station.

2. 2
   noun

   The amount of liquid that a bottle holds, or its contents.

   He drank a whole bottle of juice after the run.

3. 3
   verb

   To put a liquid into bottles.

   The company bottles spring water from the mountains.

4. 4
   noun

   A container with a rubber teat used to feed milk to a baby.

   The baby cried until she was given her bottle.

Appears in

Simplified etymology

Bottle goes back to Latin buttis, meaning “cask” or “wineskin,” which is also the source of butt and butler. The expressions have a lot of bottle, lose your bottle, and bottle out date from the 1950s and use bottle in the sense “confidence” or “nerve.” This use may come from the rhyming-slang phrase bottle and glass for “arse,” recorded from the mid-20th century, and can be compared with the former use of bottom for courage.

From Middle English bottle, botel, buttle, from Old English botl (“building, house”), from Proto-West Germanic *bōþl, from Proto-Germanic *budlą, *buþlą, *bōþlą (“house, dwelling, farm”), from Proto-Indo-European *bʰōw- (literally “to swell, grow, thrive, be, live, dwell”). Cognate with North Frisian budel, bodel, bol, boel (“dwelling, inheritable property”), Dutch boedel, boel (“inheritance, estate”), Danish bol (“farm”), Icelandic ból (“dwelling, abode, farm, lair”). Related to Old English bytlan (“to build”). More at build.

Topics

External links

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• Cambridge Dictionary
• Wiktionary