What is "flask"

Flask \Flask\, n. [AS. flasce, flaxe; akin to D. flesch, OHG. flasca, G. flasche, Icel. & Sw. flaska, Dan. flaske, OF. flasche, LL. flasca, flasco; of uncertain origin; cf. L. vasculum, dim. of vas a vessel, Gr. ?, ?, ?. Cf. Flagon, Flasket.]

1. A small bottle-shaped vessel for holding fluids; as, a flask of oil or wine.

2. A narrow-necked vessel of metal or glass, used for various purposes; as of sheet metal, to carry gunpowder in; or of wrought iron, to contain quicksilver; or of glass, to heat water in, etc.

3. A bed in a gun carriage. [Obs.]
   --Bailey.

4. (Founding) The wooden or iron frame which holds the sand, etc., forming the mold used in a foundry; it consists of two or more parts; viz., the cope or top; sometimes, the cheeks, or middle part; and the drag, or bottom part. When there are one or more cheeks, the flask is called a three part flask, four part flask, etc. Erlenmeyer flask, a thin glass flask, flat-bottomed and cone-shaped to allow of safely shaking its contents laterally without danger of spilling; -- so called from Erlenmeyer, a German chemist who invented it. Florence flask. [From Florence in Italy.]

   1. Same as Betty, n., 3.

   2. A glass flask, round or pear-shaped, with round or flat bottom, and usually very thin to allow of heating solutions.

      Pocket flask, a kind of pocket dram bottle, often covered with metal or leather to protect it from breaking.

mid-14c., from Medieval Latin flasco "container, bottle," from Late Latin flasconem (nominative flasco) "bottle," which is of uncertain origin. A word common to Germanic and Romanic, but it is unclear whether the Latin or Germanic word is the original (or whether both might have got it from the Celts). Those who support a Germanic origin compare Old English flasce "flask, bottle" (which would have become modern English *flash), Old High German flaska, Middle Dutch flasce, German Flasche "bottle." If it is Germanic, the original sense might be "bottle plaited round, case bottle" (compare Old High German flechtan "to weave," Old English fleohtan "to braid, plait"), from Proto-Germanic base *fleh- (see flax).\n

\nAnother theory traces the Late Latin word to a metathesis of Latin vasculum. "The assumption that the word is of Teut[onic] origin is chronologically legitimate, and presents no difficulty exc[ept] the absence of any satisfactory etymology" [OED]. The similar words in Finnish and Slavic are held to be from Germanic.

n. 1 A narrow-necked vessel of metal or glass, used for various purposes; as of sheet metal, to carry gunpowder in; or of wrought iron, to contain quicksilver; or of glass, to heat water in, etc. 2 A container used to discreetly carry a small amount of a hard alcoholic beverage; a pocket flask. 3 (context sciences English) laboratory glassware used to hold larger volumes than test tubes, normally having a narrow mouth of a standard size which widens to a flat or spherical base. 4 (context engineering English) A container for holding a casting mold, especially for sand casting molds. 5 A bed in a gun carriage.

1. n. bottle that has a narrow neck

2. the quantity a flask will hold [syn: flaskful]

A flask is a type of tooling used to contain a mold in metal casting. A flask has only sides, and no top or bottom, and forms a frame around the mold, which is typically made of molding sand. The shape of a flask may be square, rectangular, round or any convenient shape. A flask can be any size so long as it is larger than the pattern being used to make the sand mold. Flasks are commonly made of steel, aluminum or even wood. A simple flask has two parts, the cope and the drag, and more elaborate flasks may have three or even four parts.

Flask is a unit used in UK avoirdupois weight to measure mercury.

Flask may refer to:

• Laboratory flask, laboratory glassware for holding larger volumes than simple test tubes
  • Erlenmeyer flask, a widely used type of laboratory flask which features a flat bottom, a conical body, and a cylindrical neck
• Vacuum flask a container designed to keep warm drinks warm and refrigerated drinks cold
• Hip flask, a small container used to carry a small amount of liquid
• Flask (casting) a container without a top or bottom, with sides only, used to hold molding sand
• Flask (web framework) a web framework for the Python programming language
• Powder flask
• FLASK, the Flux Advanced Security Kernel, an operating system security architecture
• Flask, a 76-pound (34.46 kg) unit of mass used to measure mercury. Mercury does not react with iron. Historically, mercury was stored and shipped in iron flasks.

Flask is a micro web framework written in Python and based on the Werkzeug toolkit and Jinja2 template engine. It is BSD licensed.

The latest stable version of Flask is 0.11 as of June 2016. Applications that use the Flask framework include Pinterest, LinkedIn, and the community web page for Flask itself.

Flask is called a micro framework because it does not require particular tools or libraries. It has no database abstraction layer, form validation, or any other components where pre-existing third-party libraries provide common functions. However, Flask supports extensions that can add application features as if they were implemented in Flask itself. Extensions exist for object-relational mappers, form validation, upload handling, various open authentication technologies and several common framework related tools. Extensions are updated far more regularly than the core Flask program.