tooth-bottle
nounEtymology Unknown. Most likely from use as a washstand container.
1
Obsolete A small metal bottle often used to contain a small amount of alcohol.
- They filled up their glasses with the red wine from the tooth-bottle and they had other little glasses of brown wine as well.1930, Life and Letters and the London Mercury - Volume 4, page 367:
- But perhaps the most interesting of these fragments in pale-green metal is the neck from a bottle, in shape and size resembling a washstand 'tooth bottle', but with a flatly everted orifice.1935, William Arnold Thorpe, English Glass, page 83:
1 more example
- The tooth-bottle is at your elbow.1938, P.G. Wodehouse, The Code of the Woosters: