Flask

How to spell flask

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce flask

What does flask mean?

1. nounA narrow-necked bottle or insulated container for carrying a drink or other liquid.
2. nounA glass laboratory vessel with a wide body and a narrow neck, used to hold or mix liquids.

Flask in a sentence

• She filled a flask with hot coffee before the long drive.

• The chemist swirled the solution gently in a conical flask.

• He kept a small metal flask of whisky in his coat pocket.

• Each flask on the bench was labelled with the sample number.

Where does flask come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Flask reaches modern English through Old English flasce or flaxe, meaning a bottle or vessel for holding liquid. That word is part of a wider Germanic family, and it also turns up in Medieval Latin as flasca or flasco, so scholars still debate whether the Latin form borrowed from the Germanic one or the other way round. In the later Middle Ages the sense was reinforced by Old French flasque, used for a powder flask carried by soldiers. A surprising relative is the Italian fiasco, which literally meant a bottle; the modern sense of fiasco as a flop grew from a theatrical phrase about a performance going to the bottle. The spelling has stayed mercifully simple, with the consonant cluster sk preserved straight from its early Germanic form.

How the word is built

• flask (a single root word, not built from a prefix or suffix; from Old English flasce, a bottle or container)