Meaning & use
bottletop
Last updated
Meaning
nouncountable
The small lid or cap that you put on a bottle to close it, often made of metal or plastic.
Grammar: Countable: a bottletop, two bottletops. It can be written as one word or two (bottle top), and the plural is bottletops.
Patterns
- a bottletop
- bottletops
- screw on a bottletop
He twisted the bottletop off and poured himself a glass of water.
Please put the bottletop back on the milk so it stays fresh.
The children collected bottletops and used them to make a picture.
Word forms
| plural | bottletops |
|---|
Common combinations
- a metal bottletop
- The old glass bottles had metal bottletops that rusted easily.
- a plastic bottletop
- She always recycles plastic bottletops separately.
- screw on the bottletop
- Screw on the bottletop tightly so the fizzy drink doesn't go flat.
- take off the bottletop
- He couldn't take off the bottletop with his hands, so he used a tool.
Synonyms and how they differ
- cap
- Cap is the more general word for a lid, and in American English 'bottle cap' is the usual term for this object.
- lid
- Lid is used for covers on containers like jars or boxes; it is less specific to bottles than bottletop.
- top
- Top can mean the closing part of many things, but by itself it is vaguer than bottletop.
Commonly confused: bottletop or bottle top?
bottletop vs bottle top
This is just the two-word spelling of the same thing; both are correct, but bottletop as one word is more common in British English.
Practice
Choose the sentence that uses 'bottletop' correctly.
Choose one answer.
A bottletop is the cap you remove to open a bottle, so you unscrew it and then drink the water. You cannot drink a bottletop (option A), you drink from the bottle not the bottletop (option C), and you do not put water into a bottletop to close it (option D).
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “bottletop”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.