tooth-bottle

English

Etymology

Unknown. Most likely from use as a washstand container.

Noun

tooth-bottle (plural tooth-bottles)

  1. (obsolete) A small metal bottle often used to contain a small amount of alcohol.
    • 1930, Life and Letters and the London Mercury - Volume 4, page 367:
      They filled up their glasses with the red wine from the tooth-bottle and they had other little glasses of brown wine as well.
    • 1935, William Arnold Thorpe, English Glass, page 83:
      But perhaps the most interesting of these fragments in pale-green metal is the neck from a bottle, in shape and size resembling a washstand 'tooth bottle', but with a flatly everted orifice.
    • 1938, P.G. Wodehouse, The Code of the Woosters:
      The tooth-bottle is at your elbow.
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