Bottling

How to spell bottling

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce bottling

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does bottling mean?

1. verbThe act of putting a liquid into bottles for storage or sale.
2. verbThe act of holding back or suppressing feelings instead of expressing them.

Bottling in a sentence

• The bottling line at the brewery fills hundreds of units an hour.

• Bottling up your frustration at work will only make the stress worse.

• She spent the weekend bottling her homemade tomato sauce.

• The counsellor warned him that bottling his grief would not help him heal.

Where does bottling come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is the present-participle and gerund form of the verb 'bottle', which itself grew from the noun. The noun came into English in the 1300s from the Old French 'boteille', which in turn descended from the Late Latin 'butticula', a diminutive meaning 'little cask' or 'small vessel', built on 'buttis', the Latin word for a cask or barrel. The same 'buttis' root lies behind the English word 'butt' in the sense of a large barrel and behind 'butler', originally the servant in charge of the wine casks. The verb 'to bottle', meaning to put liquid into bottles, appeared later and added the ordinary '-ing' ending; because the base word ends in a single short-vowel syllable spelled with double 't', the spelling keeps that double 't' and simply drops the final 'e' before '-ing', which is the small trap that catches writers who add an unwanted 'e'.

How the word is built

• bottle (vessel, from Latin buttis: cask)
• -ing (verb/gerund suffix)