Other forms: bottoms
The bottom of something is its lowest part — the bottom of the stairs, the bottom of the page, the bottom of the sea. As an adjective it means lowest of a set: the bottom shelf, bottom of the league.
It is also a polite everyday word for the part of the body you sit on, used freely with children and less freely elsewhere. From the lowest point come several figurative uses: get to the bottom of something means to find the real cause, and rock bottom is the lowest possible point. Note bottom line, which comes from accounting and means the final result or the essential point — and is now used far more often in meetings than in ledgers.
1nounbaseThe lowest part of something.
“There was a coin at the bottom of the bag.”
2adjectivebottomLowest of a set.
“It is on the bottom shelf.”
3nounbodyThe part of the body you sit on.
“He sat down on the cold step and complained about his bottom.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
bottom is a lowest part.
Old English botm goes back to a Proto-Indo-European root meaning the lowest part, which also gives Latin fundus — the source of found, fundamental and profound. The bottom of a thing and the foundation of it are the same idea in two languages.
Proto-Indo-European
*bʰudʰmḗn
Middle English
botme
English, today
bottom
From Middle English botme. From Middle English botme,botom, from Old English botm,bodan (“bottom, foundation; ground, abyss”), from Proto-West Germanic butm, from Proto-Germanic butmaz (“bottom; ground”), from Proto-Indo-European bʰudʰmḗn (“bottom”). 2
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA