dishpan n.

Old English disc "plate, bowl, platter," from Latin discus "dish, platter, quoit," in Medieval Latin "a table, dais, desk, pulpit," from Greek diskos "disk, platter" (see disk (n.)).

A common West Germanic borrowing; Old High German took the word as tisc "plate," but German Tisch now means "table," in common with some other later Romanic forms of Latin discus (such as Italian desco, French dais); compare desk (n.), dais.

Meaning "particular variety of food served in a dish" is first recorded mid-15c. Meaning "what one likes, what is suited to one's taste" is by 1918; that of "attractive woman" is 1920s. Meaning "concave reflector or antenna" attested from 1948.

Originally applied to very shallow or flat vessels, as plates and platters, the term now usually includes any large open vessel, more or less deep, and with or without a cover, used to contain food or table-drink such as tea, coffee, or chocolate. The use of the term to include drinking-vessels, as bowls and cups, is less common, and seems to be obsolescent, except as such vessels are included in the collective plural dishes. [Century Dictionary, 1897]

"broad, shallow vessel of metal used for domestic purposes," Middle English panne, from Old English panne, earlier ponne (Mercian) "pan," from Proto-Germanic *panno "pan" (source also of Old Norse panna, Old Frisian panne, Middle Dutch panne, Dutch pan, Old Low German panna, Old High German phanna, German pfanne), probably an early borrowing (4c. or 5c.) from Vulgar Latin *patna. This is supposed to be from Latin patina "shallow pan, dish, stew-pan," from Greek patane "plate, dish," from PIE *pet-ano-, from root *pete- "to spread."

But both the Latin and Germanic words might be from a substrate language [Boutkan]. Irish panna probably is from English, and Lithuanian panė is from German.

The word has been used of any hollow thing shaped somewhat like a pan; the sense of "head, top of the head" is by c. 1300. It was used of pan-shaped parts of mechanical apparatus from c. 1590; hence flash in the pan (see flash (n.1)), a figurative use from early firearms, where a pan held the priming (and the gunpowder might "flash," but no shot ensue). To go out of the (frying) pan into the fire "escape one evil only to fall into a worse" is in Spenser (1596).