Bottle

How to spell bottle

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce bottle

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does bottle mean?

1. nounA narrow-necked container, usually of glass or plastic, made for holding liquid.
2. verbTo put a liquid into bottles, or to suppress and hold back a feeling.
3. nounCourage or nerve to do something difficult or frightening.

Bottle in a sentence

• noun

  She filled a bottle with water before the hike.

• verb

  The small farm decided to bottle its own apple juice for sale.

• noun

  He never found the bottle to ask for a pay rise.

• noun

  The recycling bin was full of every empty bottle from the party.

• verb

  Trying to bottle his anger only made the meeting worse.

• noun

  It takes real bottle to speak in front of a hostile crowd.

Where does bottle come from?

Language of origin: French

The word comes from the Old French boteille, meaning a small container for liquid, which descended from the Late Latin butticula, a diminutive of buttis meaning 'cask' or 'barrel'. The literal sense was therefore 'little cask', a small vessel for holding wine, water, or oil. English took the word in during the 1300s and gradually narrowed it toward the familiar glass or plastic container of today. The same Latin buttis also gave rise to the words 'butt' (a large barrel) and, more distantly, 'butler', the servant who originally looked after the bottles. The doubled 't' and the closing '-le' both survive from that French and Latin ancestry, which is why the spelling keeps a shape it no longer sounds.

How the word is built

• bottle (from Old French boteille, ultimately Latin buttis: cask)
• no separate affixes; the -le ending reflects the diminutive that produced 'little cask'