Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun The deepest or lowest part.
  • noun The part closest to a reference point.
  • noun The underside.
  • noun The supporting part; the base.
  • noun The far end or part.
  • noun The last place, as on a list.
  • noun The lowest or least favorable position.
  • noun The basic underlying quality; the source.
  • noun The solid surface under a body of water.
  • noun Low-lying alluvial land adjacent to a river.
  • noun Nautical The part of a ship's hull below the water line.
  • noun A ship; a boat.
  • noun The trousers or short pants of pajamas.
  • noun Informal The buttocks.
  • noun The seat of a chair.
  • noun Baseball The second or last half of an inning.
  • noun Staying power; stamina. Used of a horse.
  • noun Slang One who is penetrated by another person or is the submissive partner in a sexual encounter or relationship.
  • adjective Situated at the bottom.
  • adjective Of the lowest degree, quality, rank, or amount.
  • intransitive verb To provide with an underside.
  • intransitive verb To provide with a foundation; base.
  • intransitive verb To have or strike the underside against something.
  • idiom (at bottom) Basically.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • In botany, to form a bulb or other underground expansion, as an onion.
  • In gold-mining, to get to the bed-rock, or clay, below which it is useless to sink.
  • To furnish with a bottom: as, to bottom a shoe or a chair.
  • To found or build upon; fix upon as a support; base.
  • To fathom; reach or get to the bottom of.
  • To wind round something, as in making a ball of thread.
  • In dyeing, to dye first with a certain color in preparation for another.
  • To rest; be based.
  • To strike against the bottom or end: as, a piston bottoms when it strikes against the end of the cylinder.
  • noun The lowest landing in a shaft or incline; the lowest working in a mine.
  • noun The lower portion of a seam or bed, as of coal.
  • noun In gold-mining, the old river-bed upon which the wash-dirt rests, and upon which the richest alluvial gold is found. Sometimes called the gutter.
  • noun In golf, a backward rotation of the ball which tends to check its motion after it touches the ground.
  • noun In saddlery, the portion of a martingale which passes between the horse's belly and the belly-band.
  • noun The lowest or deepest part of anything, as distinguished from the top; utmost depth, either literally or figuratively; base; foundation; root: as, the bottom of a hill, a tower, a tree, of a well or other cavity, of a page or a column of figures.
  • noun The ground under any body of water: as, a rocky bottom; a sandy bottom; to lie on the bottom of the sea.
  • noun In physical geography, the low land adjacent to a river, especially when the river is large and the level area is of considerable extent. Also called bottom-land.
  • noun In mining, that which is lowest; in Pennsylvania coal-mining, the floor, bottom-rock, or stratum on which a coal-seam rests.
  • noun The lower or hinder extremity of the trunk of an animal; the buttocks; the sitting part of man.
  • noun The portion of a chair on which one sits; the seat.
  • noun That part of a ship which is below the wales; hence, the ship itself.
  • noun The heavy impurities which collect at the bottoms of vessels in which fluids are left to settle: as, “the bottom of beer,”
  • noun plural The residuum, consisting of impure metal, often found at the bottom of a smelting-furnace when the operation has not been skilfully conducted: chiefly used in reference to copper-smelting.

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Middle English botme, from Old English botm.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Old English botm, bodan ("ground, soil, lowest part"), from Proto-Germanic *butm- (compare Dutch bodem ("bottom, ground"), Old Frisian boden ("soil"), German Boden ("ground, earth, soil")), from Proto-Indo-European *bʰudʰ- (compare Sanskrit बुध्न (budhna), Ancient Greek πυθμήν (puthmēn, "foundation"), Latin fundus ("bottom, piece of land, farm"), Old Irish bond ("sole of the foot"), Albanian bythë ("butt, end, bottom"). Meaning "posterior of a man" is from 1794; the verb "to reach the bottom of" is from 1808. Bottom dollar "the last dollar one has" is from 1882.

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Examples

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  • Let me guess: someone entered 'To serve as the receptive partner in a sexual coupling, especially homosexual.' into the tag box. Since the comma is the tag delimiter, we got two dubious tags for the price of one.

    January 21, 2009

  • Is it time for a tagment tag?

    January 21, 2009

  • Abusive tag, Nycanthro. And you've already made 9 comments on Wordie, so it's not as if you don't know how to enter a comment properly.

    January 21, 2009