Bottle

Although the word bottle now refers to vessels made of glass, it originally denoted a narrow-necked vessel made of any material, especially leather. The word bottle, which English borrowed from French in the late fourteenth century as hotel, takes its origin from the Late Latin word buticula, meaning small vessel. In turn, buticula was formed as the diminutive of the Late Latin word buttis, meaning cask or barrel, and also gave rise to the Late Latin word buticularius, the name of a servant who tended the bottles in the household wine cellar. From buticularius the French word bouteillier developed, and from this word English derived butler, first recorded in the middle of the thirteenth century. More distantly related to bottle, having derived from the same Indo-European source, is bud, the name of a plant-shoot that swells outward like a bottle.


 


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