Other forms: flasks
A flask is a bottle with a screw top that keeps a drink hot for hours. Tea on a cold touchline, coffee at a bus stop at six in the morning, the cup that is also the lid, and the smell of the inside of it.
In a laboratory a flask is a different shape and the same word: round-bottomed glass with a long thin neck, the thing every chemistry set has. A hip flask is the flat metal one that fits in a coat pocket and holds spirits. British English uses flask on its own for the vacuum kind, and Thermos is a brand name that slid into the language the way Hoover did. You fill a flask rather than pour one, and the word is about the narrow neck and the heat: a wide plastic water bottle is not a flask.
1nounflaskA bottle with a screw top that keeps a drink hot or cold for hours.~22%
“He filled a flask with tea before the drive north.”
Patterna flask of + noun (tea, coffee, soup) · fill a flask · a thermos flask · flask lid
synonyms: thermos
2nounchemistryA glass bottle with a narrow neck, used in a laboratory.~56%
“The liquid was heated in a flask over a low flame.”
3nouncontainerA flat bottle carried in a pocket, for spirits.~22%
“He kept a silver flask in his inside pocket all winter.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 138 sentences found in the wild and placed 95 of them on a sense (43 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
FLASK → a GLASS
You leave a glass of hot tea on the step in the snow before breakfast. You pick it up again at midnight and the steam is still rising off the top.
hooks ontoglass
The oldest flask was woven, not blown: the Germanic word behind it means a braid-covered bottle, a jug wrapped in wicker to stop it breaking. That same bottle gives English flagon and flacon — and fiasco, the Italian straw-covered flask, which is where the laboratory sense came in from.
Proto-Indo-European
*ploḱ-skō — flat
Proto-Germanic
*flaskǭ — braid-covered bottle, wicker-enclosed jug
Frankish
*flaskā
Medieval Latin
flascō — bottle
Old English
flasce
Middle English
flask
English, today
flask
Built from
From Middle English flask, flaske (“case, cask, keg”), from Old English flasce, flaxe (“bottle, flask”) and Medieval Latin flascō (“bottle”); from Frankish flaskā; both from Proto-Germanic flaskǭ (“braid-covered bottle, wicker-enclosed jug”), from Proto-Indo-European ploḱ-skō (“flat”), or from Proto-Indo-European pleḱ- (“to weave”). a doublet of fiasco and flacon and flagon. Related to Dutch fles; also German Low German Flaske, Fless, German Flasche, Danish flaske; also Lithuanian plókščias, Czech ploský, Albanian flashkët. The sense laboratory glassware is from Italian fiasco, and the sense container for holding a casting mold is from Middle French flasque (“powder flask”), itself from osp flasco, frasco, both from Late Latin above.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA