If you’ve been following podictionary you’ll have heard a few weeks ago, during my interview with CBC a passing reference to the word punt as the name of the indentation in the bottom of many wine bottles.

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I’ve been a little surprised how popular this particular word is when it comes to people reacting to my book.

Punt itself isn’t that popular a word.

According to a tool called wordcount (recently pointed out to me)  punt is the 23,464th most popular word in English.

According to another tool (I am not yet at liberty to unveil) punt is a word you’re likely to come across about once a month.

This despite the fact that Merriam-Webster lists seven different meanings for the word, and The Oxford English Dictionary comes up with nine different meanings.

Perhaps the most popular, at least during football season, is punt meaning “kick.”

This is a word that the dictionaries only guess at an origin for.  Perhaps a variation of bunt, they say.  Maybe related to a dialect word meaning “to hit.” The OED says of this kind of punt

“In American football the punt is a planned manoeuvre, typically utilized by the team playing offence when its scoring possibilities are minimal, in which a designated punter kicks the ball far downfield to put the opponents into a poor field position.”

Now I’ve heard people, when asked a question they can’t answer, to say “I’ll punt,” meaning “let’s move to the next question,” or “I hope the next guy can answer that, ‘cause I can’t.” This rings to me with “scoring possibilities are minimal” so you’d want to punt that question.

The oldest meaning of the word punt is a small kind of boat.  Though older, this boat name does have a traceable etymology and is related to pontoon, the word that refers to those floats that are fastened to the bottom of airplanes to enable them to land on lakes.

While the football punt didn’t appear until the mid 1800s, the boat punt has been with us for more than 1000 years and so is from Old English.  It has apparent ancestor words in both Latin and Germanic languages but mysteriously disappeared as an English word throughout the Middle English period. The OED speculates that this may be because it was a highly local word used only by people living in places where flat bottomed boats were practical.

I didn’t explain all that clearly in the interview why the dent in the bottom of a bottle was called a punt, so I’ll do that in a moment.

But one of the questions that keeps arising is: why do bottles have those punts in them in the first place?

I’ve checked around and there don’t seem to be a lot of authoritative answers.

The Oxford Companion to Wine mentions that sparkling wine bottles have particularly prominent punts and claims this is because bottles are stacked “head down” (as it were) to let the dead yeast settle against the cork.  The punt is a good place for the bottle above to rest in.

There is a widespread admiration for the punt as a place to hold a bottle while pouring it but this doesn’t seem to me a valid reason for creating the punt in the first place.

Two other explanations spin off the sparkling wine stacking explanation.

According to some the ring around the punt inside the bottle makes for a good place for yeast and sediment to settle, keeping wine clearer when poured.

Sparkling wines are pressurized and flat bottomed bottles would be more prone to breakage.  The punt acts like the arch of a bridge, strengthening the bottle.  This is the idea that appeals to me most, as a practical, mechanical reason for having a punt.

A cynical marketing reason for having a punt is said to be that the punt takes up room within the bottle making it appear bigger.

But if the etymology I mention in my book History of Wine Words is accurate the punt likely began earlier, as a byproduct of the manufacturing process.

Shakespeare was dead before glass bottles appeared on the scene.  At first they were all made by hand.  The glass blower stuck a blob of molten glass on an iron pole to poke it into the furnace and heat it up in order to be able to work it.

The pole was called a pontil from French meaning “little point.”

The word punt very likely evolved from the name of the iron rod.

Since it formed a scar on the glass when work was finished, and it was desirable that the bottle sit fairly stable on a table, the area where the pontil held the glass was pushed in a bit.  That way the bottle didn’t wobble.

Of course it’s possible that this wasn’t the etymology at all.  The earliest citation for the punt in the bottom of a bottle was from the early 1800s, roughly the same time that footballs began to be punted, and an alternative to the punt as a name for this bottle indent is the kick.