Porringer

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A small, round container often used for individual servings of hot foods or liquids
2. A shallow bowl typically used to hold a single portion of warm food or broth
3. A small, rounded dish designed for serving soups or soft foods individually

Etymology: A porringer is a bowl that began life as a dish for stew. Its Middle English forms, "paroger" and "porrynger", were variants of "potager" and "potynger", the names for a small dish of stew, and those words are thought to come from "potage" (soup or thick stew) with the suffix "-er" added. Over time the pronunciation picked up an extra "n" before the "g", the same sound change seen in "messenger" and "passenger", which is why the word now looks more like "porringer" than its older shape. The word's cousin "porridge" comes from the same family of terms for thick, pottage-like food, so the bowl and the oats share a root in the idea of a pot of something simmering. The sense of the vessel has stayed close to the sense of the food it held.

Synonyms: bowl, dish, plate