phial

• vial

From Middle English fiole, from Old French fiole, from Latin phiala (“a broad, flat, shallow cup or bowl”), from Ancient Greek φιάλη (phiálē). Doublet of vial.

• IPA^(key): /ˈfaɪəl/

  • Audio (Southern England)

    (file)

• Rhymes: -aɪəl
• Homophone: file

phial (plural phials)

1. A glass vessel or bottle, especially a small bottle for medicines.
   • 1847 October 16, Currer Bell [pseudonym; Charlotte Brontë], chapter V, in Jane Eyre. An Autobiography. […], volume II, London: Smith, Elder, and Co., […], →OCLC, page 127:

     You must open the middle drawer of my toilet-table and take out a little phial and a little glass you will find there,—quick! […] He held out the tiny glass, and I half filled it from the water bottle on the wash-stand. / “That will do:⁠—now wet the lip of the phial.” / I did so: he measured twelve drops of a crimson liquid, and presented it to Mason. / “Drink, Richard: it will give you the heart you lack, for an hour or so.”

   • 1921 May 20, Harding, Warren, Remarks of the President in Presenting to Madam Curie a Gift of Radium from the American People‎, Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, →OCLC, page 4:

     In testimony of the affection of the American people, of their confidence in your scientific work, and of their earnest wish that your genius and energy may receive all encouragement to carry forward your efforts for the advance of science and conquest of disease, I have been commissioned to present to you this little phial of radium.

• vial

• test tube

phial (third-person singular simple present phials, present participle phialling or (US) phialing, simple past and past participle phialled or (US) phialed)

1. (transitive) To put or keep in, or as in, a phial.

• “phial”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.
• “phial”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.

• Phila.

phial

1. Alternative form of fiole