bottle [ME] The word bottle goes back to Latin buttis ‘cask, wineskin’, the origin of butt [LME] and also of butler [ME] originally the man in charge of the bottles in the wine cellar. To have a lot of bottle, ‘confidence, nerve’, and the related phrases to lose your bottle and to bottle out, meaning ‘to lose your nerve’, date back to the 1950s. ‘Bottle’ here may be from rhyming slang bottle and glass, ‘arse’, found from the mid 20th century. Compare the old-fashioned use of ‘bottom’ for courage.