How does a bottle differ from a jar?
English is unusually, perhaps uniquely, rich in its selection of
words for similar things. But I find that my own sense of the meaning
of a word is often narrower than its full formal meaning.
For example, a bottle in my idiolect has a screw top which is much
narrower than the body of the vessel; it's significantly taller than
it is wide; it's probably made of glass (though as I look around most
of the bottles I see are plastic). A jar is a bit shorter, and has an
opening that takes up most of the width; and a tub is wider than it is
tall, and may not have a lid at all. All of these things are basically
cylindrical (pace Jack Daniels).
Meanwhile among the cuboids, a box has a lid that's probably intrinsic
(or at least it used to have one); a crate might well have a separate
lid, but probably doesn't; a basket is unlikely to be wickerwork but
at least has pierced sides. If it goes into or is arranged into
shelves and gets pulled out for use or has an open front, but isn't a
permanent installation like a drawer, it's a bin.
And then there are the large lidded plastic storage boxes which aren't
unambiguously described by any single word. Storage boxes, storage
bins, the tubs in the garage.
(And a "tin" is usually the small cylindrical food container, now
usually with a ring-pull top; but a box of chocolates or biscuits, or
the container in which the tea is kept, can also be "a tin",)
What I am unlikely to do is reach for the generic term "container".
Meanwhile my wife refers to anything smaller than a skip or a shipping
container (which is what she thinks of first when "container" is
said) as a "dubby", which her father brought back from military
service in India; it's probably from "dubber/dabbah" (southern Hindi
from Persian), a container (traditionally of buffalo hide) in which
ghee or oil can be transported. Wiktionary suggests that this meaning
descends ultimately from Arabic دُبَّاء (dubbāʔ, “bottle gourd”).
- Posted by J Michael Cule at
11:18am on
28 January 2026
Bun.
Bap.
Barm Cake.
Stottie.
- Posted by chris at
02:36pm on
28 January 2026
A tin is the container in which my sainted Pa used to buy two ounces of Gold Block pipe tobacco: about three inches by four, one inch tall, rounded corners, an airtight lid that comes off and goes back on again. Later I bought Golden Virginia rolling tobacco in tins of the same size and shape. Very useful for storing eg drawing pins or curtain hooks or small brass screws...
Drinks containers with a ring-pull top are mere cans, as in "a can of coke" or "a can of Red Bull" or even "a can of beer".
And tea lives in a caddy or a cannister, dashitall.
But what are the small squat rectangularish plastic containers that get left-over food put in them to go into the freezer? I call them a Chinese takeaway dubby, but what are they to other people?
- Posted by David Pulver at
07:23am on
05 February 2026
"But what are the small squat rectangularish plastic containers that get left-over food put in them to go into the freezer? I call them a Chinese takeaway dubby, but what are they to other people?"
We just call them a "container." Or possibly a plastic carton. In the US "tupperware" after the brand is sometimes used, I think. I'd never heard "dubby" when I was living in the UK but that was a half-century or more ago....
- Posted by RogerBW at
10:21am on
05 February 2026
You might well have had a better chance then, but I don't think most of the Anglo-Indian terms were in common usage much after Indian independence.
Thinking of borrowed words I have adopted the Scots "hingmy"; for me it has a shade of meaning slightly different from "thingummy", implying not just that I can't be bothered to think of the proper term but that I don't know it, and maybe there isn't one.
(I may also use "container", but to my wife, and to a lesser extent to me, it has a slight implication of "forty-foot shipping container".)