Parison

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A tube or blob of heated glass or plastic that is blown or pressed into the final shape of a bottle or container
2. The soft, unshaped lump of molten material that gets inflated or moulded into a hollow article during manufacture
3. In glassmaking and plastic moulding, the preliminary mass of hot material that is later formed into a finished hollow object

Etymology: "Parison" is a glassmaking term for the mass of molten glass gathered on a blowpipe or rod before it is shaped into a finished object. It came into English from French "paraison," which is built on the verb "parer," meaning "to prepare" or "to trim." The glassblower is, in effect, preparing the raw material for the forming stage, so the name describes a stage in the work rather than the finished product. The word has a close relative in English, "paration," which is a doublet: the two words descend from the same source but reached English by different routes and took on different shapes. Both trace back to the same French root, so they share a common ancestry even though "parison" is the one that survived in the specialist vocabulary of glassmaking.