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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
ashtray
noun
COLLOCATIONS FROM CORPUS
■ NOUN
glass
▪ An old straight-sided glass ashtray fitted the bill.
▪ She brought the square glass ashtray with the name Oglethorpe College-I 898 closer to tier.
▪ Susan Gutfreund ordered a box of glass ashtrays with the design of our future palace etched into the bottoms.
■ VERB
empty
▪ She came up with a routine for visiting the tables, and even managed to empty a few ashtrays.
▪ There were waiters everywhere, coming and going all during the meal, emptying ashtrays, filling our glasses of water.
▪ For example, if he had to smoke in her flat, he could at least have the decency to empty the ashtray.
▪ Duncan was coming closer with the brush and a big bucket, emptying ashtrays and mopping things.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ He notices, on the outer surface of the ashtray, a diagram of the shifting pattern of the four-speed transmission.
▪ I've broken all the ugly ashtrays and pots.
▪ I came over to give him a hug and noticed a cigarette still burning in the ashtray on the desk.
▪ Now, though the office air is clean, the butt-crammed ashtray outside testifies that smoking is far from stubbed out.
▪ She brought the square glass ashtray with the name Oglethorpe College-I 898 closer to tier.
▪ She came up with a routine for visiting the tables, and even managed to empty a few ashtrays.
▪ She is the woman with the lapis-lazuli ashtray in her all-white bathroom.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
ashtray

1857 as a receptacle for smokers' ashes, from ash (n.1) + tray.

Wiktionary
ashtray

n. A receptacle for ash and butts from cigarettes and cigars. n. (context poker slang English) An ace and a three as a starting hand in Texas hold 'em due to phonetic similarity with "Ace-Trey"

WordNet
ashtray

n. a receptacle for the ash from smokers' cigars or cigarettes

Wikipedia
Ashtray

An ashtray is a receptacle for ash, typically from combustible consumer products such as cigarettes and cigars. Ashtrays are typically made of fireproof material such as glass, heat-resistant plastic, pottery, metal, or rock. Improvised ashtrays may include coffee cans and glasses.

The most common ashtray design is a shallow cylinder with a flat base, to rest on a table. Other ashtrays, particularly in public places, are wall mounted, and larger than standard tabletop ashtrays due to the increased use they receive. Many ashtrays have notches at the rim, to hold cigarettes and/or a cigar. In Spain, some ashtrays consist of two interlocking parts, the bottom of which is filled with water. Ashtrays are also often built into cars and dustbins, and provided in toilets and other public places. Ashtrays were not a common part of life until the early 20th century, when cigarette manufacturers began to encourage the development of ashtrays as an American consumer product. The word itself did not come into common use until 1926. Ashtrays have been a popular advertising vehicle. Collectors look for ashtrays with clever and unusual ads, colors, shapes and sizes. Some ashtrays of the late 1940s to early 1970s were freeform vehicles for Googie styling. Designers noted for their ashtray design include Marianne Brandt, Maurice Ascalon, Walter Bosse's hedgehog ashtrays, and Masahiro Mori. During the 1950s and 1960s, small personal ashtrays were part of a table setting, commonly placed on the top right-hand side, behind the wine and water glasses. An accompanying item, the silent butler, would be used to collect ashes from the ashtrays, rather than carrying the ashtrays to a trashcan. Ashtrays in public places are becoming increasingly rare due to the proliferation of smoking bans. In addition, many vehicle manufacturers no longer include ashtrays as standard equipment, instead offering ashtrays and lighter plugs as optional accessories, typically dealer-installed. To fill this niche market, ashtrays which are designed to fit into an automobile's cup holders are now on the market.

Usage examples of "ashtray".

I can put out the duckbilled platypus ashtray my mates gave me when I was leaving the Outback?

He batted at it gummily, smacking his lips against the ashtray taste in his mouth.

Several times I had woken up in the night to make sure all the cigarette butts in the ashtray beside her were out, looking under the bed in case one had fallen there.

Among all the possessions he had in that deep room with the frieze of live swallows, the African drums each with its ashtray and pipe beside each chair, the collection of Malian and Nigerian masks on the walls, the Fon hangings, the rugs from Khartoum with their counter-pattern of his pipe-burnings, the wall covered with shelves of damp books that gave the place its own body-smell-there must have been that same novel.

The other ashtray on the floor by his chair is full of the ragged little new moons of bitten nails, which has got to mean that the Hester T.

He got to his feet and picked up the slender panetella from his ashtray.

A loaf of titi bread and a wax paper packet of homemade Jamaican-style jerky had disappeared, along with the stub end of a cigar-shaped spliff the Rastaman vaguely remembered having left in the conch shell ashtray.

The carapace of the instrument binnacle, the inclined planes of the dashboard panel, the metal sills of the radio and ashtrays gleamed around me like altarpieces, their geometries reaching towards my body like the stylized embraces of some hyper-cerebral machine.

Together we showed our wounds to each other, exposing the scars on our chests and hands to the beckoning injury sites on the interior of the car, to the pointed sills of the chromium ashtrays, to the lights of a distant intersection.

She walks around the desk and she sits down and she pushes an ashtray toward me.

The Dutch-style row houses had been chopped into pieces and misused as rooming houses for men with hot plates and ashtrays and racing forms, or floor-through apartments, where sprawling families of cousins were crammed into each level, their yards and stoops teeming with uncountable children.

The storyboards were already set up in the front of the room, and Janis had seen to coffee and ashtrays.

He left the cigarette to burn in the ashtray on the bedstand and rolled out of bed to cross the room.

Some were sitting on the stools, gazing at their reflections in the mirrors, smoking cigarettes, tapping their ashes on the rims of the ashtrays on the tabletops, sipping white wine or rattling the ice cubes in their drinks.

Food for Africa program kill off donations to these missions and knock out their Voice of Salvation radio over there have you got an ashtray?