A small plug or peg used to stop the bottom of a test tube or laboratory vessel.
From French culot, meaning 'a sediment or dregs at the bottom' (from cul, 'bottom' + -ot, a diminutive suffix). The word entered English scientific vocabulary in the 19th century.
This obscure laboratory term shows how French provided hundreds of scientific and technical words to English—when lab equipment needed naming, chemists borrowed French vocabulary for precision.
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