Pot

How to spell pot

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce pot

What does pot mean?

1. nounA deep round container used for cooking, storing, or growing plants.
2. verbTo plant something in a container of soil.
3. nounThe total amount of money staked in a card game or bet.

Pot in a sentence

• noun

  She left the soup simmering in a heavy pot on the stove.

• verb

  In spring she likes to pot the seedlings once the frost has passed.

• noun

  With a strong hand, she pushed all her chips into the pot.

• noun

  The basil grew well in a small clay pot on the windowsill.

• verb

  The gardener will pot each cutting in fresh compost.

• noun

  The winning player scooped the entire pot at the end of the round.

Where does pot come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The word pot comes from the Old English 'pott', a vessel for holding liquids or food, and it has close cousins across the Germanic family, including the Dutch 'pot' and German 'Pott'. Behind these forms lies a late Latin word 'pottus', which may itself trace back to an earlier source describing a rounded drinking or cooking vessel. The basic meaning, a deep round container, has stayed remarkably stable for well over a thousand years. Over time English layered new senses on top of the literal one, from the gambling 'pot' of pooled stakes (first recorded in card-playing contexts) to the twentieth-century slang use for cannabis, which arrived through American English. Because the word is so short and phonetically regular, the spelling has never drifted, which is exactly why it sits among the easiest words to write from memory.

How the word is built

• pot (single root from Old English/Germanic: a rounded vessel)