vase

Etymology

It is borrowed from French vase,^[2][3][4][5] from Latin vās (“vessel, container”).^[2][3][5][6] Etymonline finds an earlier use in a late 14th-century inventory, of a silver vessel, from Old French vas or vase.^[6] The Latin word is cognate with Umbrian vasor (“vessels”), but no certain cognates outside Italic are known,^[5][4] and Etymonline calls it of unknown origin.^[6] Its diminutives gave English vascular and, through French, vessel.^[7]

Earliest recorded meaning

In architecture, the bell-shaped body of a capital: 1563, in Shute's First Groundes of Architecture.^[2][5]

Semantic evolution

The sense of a decorative vessel, as for flowers, dates from 1629,^[2][5][4] and in 1706 the word is first found naming a carved or moulded ornament in that shape.^[2] Johnson (1755) defined it as a vessel "rather for show than use".^[8] The pronunciation has changed more than the meaning: the word was at first rhymed with base and face (Swift, Byron), as it still is in American English, while British English moved in the 19th century to a pronunciation rhyming with bores and then with bars.^[7][6][2]

Timeline

• late 14th century – a silver vessel, in an inventory.^[6]
• 1563 – the bell of a capital, in architecture (obsolete by 1753).^[2][5]
• 1629 – an ornamental vessel, as for flowers.^[2][5][4]
• 1706 – an ornament in the form of a vase.^[2]
• 1728 – a calyx or growth shaped like a vase.^[2]

Meanings

Noun

1. A vessel, often deeper than it is wide, used for holding cut flowers or as an ornament: She put the tulips in a glass vase.^[9][4][2]
2. An ornament, as on furniture or a building, shaped like such a vessel.^[4][2]

Word family

• vaselike

Related words

• vessel
• vascular
• vas

Usage notes

The usual British pronunciation is /vɑːz/, while American English has /veɪs/ and /veɪz/ as well as /vɑːz/.^[10][2] Weekley noted that his father, who died in 1920, still used the older pronunciation, then usual in the United States.^[11]

References

1. ^ a b Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m Oxford English Dictionary Online (accessed March 2026), Oxford: Oxford University Press
3. ^ a b The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (online 2024), 5th ed., Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
4. ^ a b c d e f Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary (2024), online ed., Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster
5. ^ a b c d e f g Barnhart, Robert K. (1988), The Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology
6. ^ a b c d e Harper, Douglas. Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com
7. ^ a b Ayto, John (2005), Word Origins: The Secret Histories of English Words from A to Z, 2nd ed., London: A & C Black
8. ^ Johnson, Samuel (1755), A Dictionary of the English Language, London; 4th ed. 1773; Johnson's Dictionary Online, ed. Beth Rapp Young et al.
9. ^ Collins English Dictionary (2023), Glasgow: HarperCollins
10. ^ Jones, Daniel (2011), Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary, 18th ed., ed. Peter Roach, Jane Setter and John Esling, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
11. ^ Weekley, Ernest (1921), An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English, London: John Murray