percolator

UK/ˈpɜːkəleɪtə/US/ˈpɝkəleɪtɚ/

nounC2Very rare — outside the 30,000 commonest English words, so you will meet it in writing rather than in speechleans spoken

Other forms: percolators

A percolator is the old stovetop pot that bubbles water up through ground coffee. A little glass dome on the lid that shows it working.

The mechanism sends boiling water up a tube and back down through the grounds over and over, which extracts a great deal and also over-extracts, which is why percolator coffee has a reputation for bitterness. Filter machines replaced it almost entirely. The bubbling sound and the smell are the reason people keep them anyway. The verb percolate also means to spread gradually through something.

Definitions of percolator

1nounpercolatorA pot that brews coffee by cycling boiling water through the grounds.C2
“The percolator was going when they came down.”

Also accepted in games: coffee pot

Where it comes from

From percolate + -or.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Man Called Ove

First appears in chapter 2 of A Man Called Ove.

Practise this word

percolator in the wild

Coffee percolators once enjoyed great popularity but were supplanted in the early 1970s by automatic drip-brew coffeemakers.
Coffee percolator
As a result, coffee brewed with a percolator is particularly susceptible to overextraction.
Coffee percolator
Loysel's rapid filter, a hydrostatic percolator; and those pots to which Morize, Lemare, Grandin, Crepaux, and Gandais gave their names.
All about coffee· William H. Ukers

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

From Project Gutenberg, public domain. These sentences are from real books, shown to illustrate the word at work.

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