Bottled

How to spell bottled

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce bottled

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does bottled mean?

1. adjectiveStored, sold, or supplied in a bottle.
2. verbPut a liquid into bottles for storage or sale.
3. verbLost one's nerve and failed to go through with something.

Bottled in a sentence

• adjective

  The hotel left a complimentary bottled water in every room.

• verb

  The family bottled their homemade cider every autumn.

• verb

  He bottled the big presentation and walked out before it began.

• adjective

  Many shoppers now prefer bottled beer to canned.

• verb

  The dairy bottled the fresh milk before dawn.

• verb

  She bottled the penalty kick when the whole stadium was watching.

Where does bottled come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The base word bottle came into English in the 1300s from the Old French boteille, which descended from the Late Latin butticula, a diminutive meaning 'little cask' or 'small vessel'. That in turn grew from buttis, the Latin word for a cask or barrel, the same ancestor that gives us 'butt' in the old sense of a large wine barrel. As English speakers attached the ordinary -ed ending, bottled emerged both as a past tense ('they bottled the wine') and as an adjective describing anything sold or stored in a bottle. A purely British informal sense, 'bottled it' meaning lost one's nerve, appeared in the twentieth century, probably from the slang idea of one's courage draining away. The spelling trap to remember is the doubled t in the middle, inherited straight from the diminutive butticula.

How the word is built

• bottle (vessel, from Late Latin butticula 'small cask')
• -ed (past tense / past participle / adjective suffix)