smelling bottle
- noun
- /ˈsmɛlɪŋ ˈbɑtəl/
- Archaic
:
frasco de olores
- After the long hike, Tom took out his smelling bottle to help his friend who was feeling dizzy.
Examples
-
The nurse used a smelling bottle to help the patient regain consciousness after he fainted.
-
"I should have brought the smelling bottle, dear heart," Viola muttered, but Mother Green only gave her a reproachful look.
Fiction book (2002) -
When she felt faint during the presentation, her friend quickly handed her a smelling bottle filled with salts to revive her.
Synonyms
6
4.1
A strong, sharp liquid people breathe in to wake someone who fainted
Surface Forms
Morphology
The phrase is compositionally interpretable as 'a bottle related to smell' (a bottle that smells or contains something that smells), so learners who know 'smelling' and 'bottle' will infer a bottle associated with an odor. However, the specific conventional function — that it contains smelling salts used to revive someone who has fainted — is a specialized, conventionalized meaning not fully predictable from the parts, so the expression is only partially transparent.
Etymology
The noun smelling bottle comes from the small glass bottle people carried that held strong smelling salts. If someone began to 'faint', people would hold the bottle under their nose so the sharp smell would wake them. So the name means a small bottle used to 'revive' someone who feels faint.