Bottoms

How to spell bottoms

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce bottoms

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does bottoms mean?

1. nounThe lowest parts or undersides of things; also the lower garments of a two-piece outfit.
2. verbThird-person singular form of 'to bottom'; to reach the lowest point before recovering or steadying.

Bottoms in a sentence

• noun

  The bottoms of the saucepans were scorched after the long boil.

• verb

  The analyst predicts the market bottoms out in the spring.

• noun

  She packed the pyjama bottoms but forgot the matching tops.

• verb

  The suspension bottoms out whenever the truck hits a deep pothole.

Where does bottoms come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The word descends from the Old English botm, meaning the lowest part, the foundation, or the ground beneath water, and it belongs to a wide family of Germanic relatives such as the Dutch bodem and the German Boden, both meaning ground or floor. These trace back to an ancient root that also gave Latin fundus 'bottom, base' and the Greek pythmen, showing how old and stable the idea of a 'lowest part' really is. In English the singular held many senses over the centuries, from the bed of a valley to the keel of a ship and even the seat of a chair, and the plural simply pluralised those uses. The spelling has stayed remarkably steady: the doubled t reflects the short, stressed vowel, and the silent flow into the unstressed -om ending is what occasionally trips writers who hear only 'bot-umz'. The casual sense of the human seat, and the clothing sense (pyjama bottoms), are later, everyday extensions of the same plain old word for the lowest part of something.

How the word is built

• bottom (Old English botm: lowest part, foundation)
• -s (plural / third-person singular suffix)