Dictionary

tooth-bottle en · NOUN

Etymology

Unknown. Most likely from use as a washstand container.

Meanings

1. (obsolete) A small metal bottle often used to contain a small amount of alcohol.
   • They filled up their glasses with the red wine from the tooth-bottle and they had other little glasses of brown wine as well. 1930, Life and Letters and the London Mercury - Volume 4, page 367:
   • 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. 1935, William Arnold Thorpe, English Glass, page 83:
   • The tooth-bottle is at your elbow. 1938, P.G. Wodehouse, The Code of the Woosters:

Forms