Other forms: pots, potted, potting
A pot is a deep round container. In the kitchen it is the big metal one you boil pasta in, or a small plastic one of yoghurt; on a windowsill it is the clay one a plant sits in.
Cooking supplies most of the phrases: a pot of tea for two, a pot of soup on the stove, a pot of paint, a pot of jam with a cloth lid. Money makes a pot as well — the pot in a card game is everything the players have put in, and a jackpot is a very large one. As a verb you pot a plant into fresh soil and you pot a ball in snooker. Something that has gone to pot has fallen apart from neglect, and the pot calling the kettle black is one person accusing another of exactly their own fault. One to know: in informal English pot also means cannabis, so smoking pot has nothing to do with kitchens.
1nounpotA deep round container used for cooking.~40%
“He lifted the lid off the pot and the steam went straight up the window.”
Patterna pot of + noun (soup, tea, coffee) · a cooking / stock pot · pot lid · pots and pans
2nounsmallA small container holding food or another substance.~27%
“She peeled the lid off a pot of yoghurt and ate it standing up.”
3nounclayA container of clay or plastic in which a plant is grown.~2%
“The herbs live in pots by the back door.”
4nounmoneyAll the money staked in a game, or a sum of money collected for a purpose.~27%
“He pushed his last chips into the pot and lost them.”
5verbsoilTo plant something in a pot of soil.~2%
“She potted the seedlings and lined them up on the sill.”
6nouncannabisCannabis, in informal speech.~2%
“The whole stairwell smelled of pot.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 7 sentences found in the wild and placed 7 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
pot is a container.
Also accepted in games: saucepan
POT → TOP backwards: take the top off
Spell it backwards and you get top: take the top off the pot and look at what is cooking inside.
hooks ontotop
Pot entered English twice at once — from Old English pott and from Old French pot — and both go back to Proto-Germanic *puttaz and, behind that, a Proto-Indo-European word *budnós for a kind of vessel. Dutch pot, German Pott and Icelandic pottur, 'tub', are the same short word. Some things have kept the same name for thousands of years.
Middle English
pot
English, today
pot
From Middle English pot. From Middle English pot, potte, from Old English pott (“pot”) and Old French pot (“pot”) (probably from Frankish pott); both Old English and Frankish from Proto-Germanic puttaz (“pot”), from Proto-Indo-European budnós (“a type of vessel”). Cognate with stq Pot (“pot”), Dutch pot (“pot”), German Low German Pott (“pot”), German Pott (“pot”), Swedish potta (“chamber pot”), Icelandic pottur (“tub, pot”), xcl պոյտն (“pot, earthen pot”). Also, Old Norse pottr (“pot, tub, basin”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA