Pottle

An archaic 2-quart pewter jug capacity metric used for sharing liquids.

Two quarts, four pints, half a gallon: a substantial vessel, and one that appears throughout Elizabethan and Jacobean writing as the measure of a thoroughly committed evening. Shakespeare uses it, and a pottle of wine turns up in tavern scenes as shorthand for excess. The word also had a second life in the fruit trade, where a pottle was a small tapering basket of strawberries or raspberries rather than a liquid measure at all, and pottles of fruit were still being sold in London markets in the nineteenth century. The name descends from the Old French potel, a little pot. It fell out of use for liquids as the half-gallon took over, which is the same quantity described less memorably.