Noun

The lowest part from the uppermost part, in either of these senses:

# (rfc-sense) The part furthest in the direction toward which an unsupported object would fall.

#* Macaulay

barrels with the bottom knocked out

#* Washington Irving

No two chairs were alike; such high backs and low backs and leather bottoms and worsted bottoms.

# (rfc-sense) The part seen, or intended to be seen, nearest the edge of the visual field normally occupied by the lowest visible objects, as "footers appear at the bottoms of pages".

(uncountable, British, slang) Character, reliability, staying power, dignity, integrity or sound judgment.

lack bottom

(British, US) a valley, often used in place names.

Where shall we go for a walk? How about Ashcombe Bottom ?

* Stoddard

the bottoms and the high grounds

(euphemistic) The buttocks or anus.

(nautical) a cargo vessel, a ship.

* 1881 , :

We sail in leaky bottoms and on great and perilous waters; [...]

(nautical) certain parts of a vessel, particularly the cargo hold or the portion of the ship that is always underwater.

* Shakespeare

My ventures are not in one bottom trusted.

* Bancroft

Not to sell the teas, but to return them to London in the same bottoms in which they were shipped.

(baseball) The second half of an inning, the home team's turn to bat.

(BDSM) A submissive in sadomasochistic sexual activity.

(LGBT, slang) A man penetrated or with a preference for being penetrated during homosexual intercourse.

(physics) A bottom quark.

(often, figuratively) The lowest part of a container.

* {{quote-news, year=2011

, date=December 21 , author=Helen Pidd , title=Europeans migrate south as continent drifts deeper into crisis , work=the Guardian citation , page= , passage=In Ireland, where 14.5% of the population are jobless, emigration has climbed steadily since 2008, when Lehman Brothers collapsed and the bottom fell out of the Irish housing market. In the 12 months to April this year, 40,200 Irish passport-holders left, up from 27,700 the previous year, according to the central statistics office. Irish nationals were by far the largest constituent group among emigrants, at almost 53%.}}

A ball or skein of thread; a cocoon.

* Mortimer

Silkworms finish their bottoms in fifteen days.

The bed of a body of water, as of a river, lake, or sea.

An abyss.

(Dryden)

(obsolete) Power of endurance.

a horse of a good bottom

(obsolete) Dregs or grounds; lees; sediment.

(Johnson)

Noun

(en noun)

The act of founding, fixing, establishing, or beginning to erect.

That upon which anything is founded; that on which anything stands, and by which it is supported; the lowest and supporting layer of a superstructure; groundwork; basis; underbuilding.

* {{quote-magazine, date=2013-07-20, volume=408, issue=8845, magazine=(The Economist)

, title= The attack of the MOOCs , passage=Since the launch early last year of […] two Silicon Valley start-ups offering free education through MOOCs, massive open online courses, the ivory towers of academia have been shaken to their foundations . University brands built in some cases over centuries have been forced to contemplate the possibility that information technology will rapidly make their existing business model obsolete.}}

(card games) In solitaire or patience games, one of the piles of cards that the player attempts to build, usually holding all cards of a suit in ascending order.

(architecture) The lowest and supporting part or member of a wall, including the base course and footing courses; in a frame house, the whole substructure of masonry.

* {{quote-news, year=2012, date=May 20, author=Nathan Rabin, work=The Onion AV Club

, title= TV: Review: THE SIMPSONS (CLASSIC): “Marge Gets A Job” (season 4, episode 7; originally aired 11/05/1992) , passage=“Marge Gets A Job” opens with the foundation of the Simpson house tilting perilously to one side, making the family homestead look like the suburban equivalent of the Leaning Tower Of Pisa. }}

A donation or legacy appropriated to support a charitable institution, and constituting a permanent fund; endowment.

That which is founded, or established by endowment; an endowed institution or charity.

(cosmetics) Cosmetic cream roughly skin-colored, designed to make the face appear uniform in color and texture.

A basis for social bodies or intellectual disciplines.

* {{quote-magazine, date=2013-08-03, volume=408, issue=8847, magazine=(The Economist)

, title= Boundary problems , passage=Economics is a messy discipline: too fluid to be a science, too rigorous to be an art. Perhaps it is fitting that economists’ most-used metric, gross domestic product (GDP), is a tangle too.