teakettle

/ˈtiˌkɛtəl/

teakettle noun: a vessel used to boil water for tea or other hot beverages.

Noun

teakettle (plural teakettles)

(dated outside US) A vessel used to boil water for tea or other hot beverages.
- Phœbe and the fire that boiled the teakettle were equally bright, cheerful, and efficient, in their respective offices.1851 April 9, Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables, a Romance, Boston, Mass.: Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, →OCLC
- “Such a cunning teakettle and saucepan, and a tete-a-tete set, and lots of good things to eat. Do have toast for tea, Polly, and let me make it with the new toasting fork; it's such fun to play cook.”1869–1870, Louisa M[ay] Alcott, chapter VIII, in An Old-Fashioned Girl, Boston, Mass.: Roberts Brothers, published 1870, →OCLC

teakettle (third-person singular simple present teakettles, present participle teakettling, simple past and past participle teakettled)

(intransitive, rare) To make a shrill sound like a boiling teakettle.
- The Carolina wrens love it too, and they were teakettling away around me.2006, Tim Traver, Sippewissett, Or, Life on a Salt Marsh, page 46
- They'd been running hard and the only thing he could hear was his own heart pounding and his breath teakettling in and out of his lungs.2011, Joe Schreiber, The Unholy Cause

More languagesFewer languages

Noun
plural	teakettles
alternative form	tea kettle
alternative form	tea-kettle
Verb
third-person singular present	teakettles
present participle	teakettling
past participle	teakettled
past	teakettled

From tea + kettle.

What does teakettle mean?: Teakettle means a vessel used to boil water for tea or other hot beverages.
What is teakettle in Hindi?: Teakettle in Hindi is केतली (ketlī). See Teakettle meaning in Hindi.
What part of speech is teakettle?: Teakettle can be a noun or a verb.
How do you pronounce teakettle?: Teakettle is pronounced /ˈtiˌkɛtəl/ (US).
What is the plural of teakettle?: The plural of teakettle is teakettles.

Adapted from Wiktionary: teakettle (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated: 2026-09-02

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-teakettle.wav.

Cite this entry: “teakettle.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/teakettle. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.