vessel [ME] Vessel comes via French from Latin vascellum ‘small vase, ship’. The apparently contradictory senses of something that contains liquid and something that floats upon water was inherited by English from Latin. The link seems to be the idea of a container, which runs through the varied uses of the word in Latin, French, and English. The sense of a part of the body containing fluid such as a blood vessel is Late Middle English. Vascellum is a diminutive of Latin vas ‘vessel’, which also gives us vase [M16th] and vascular [L17th].