pannikin

plural pannikins

1. A durable cup or other vessel used for drinking made of metal and coated in enamel.

   Water was seriously rationed, and each slave was given half a pint of water served in a pannikin.

   2007, Toyin Falola, Amanda Warnock, editors, Encyclopedia of the Middle Passage, Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood, page 131

   5 more examples

   1852, Ellen Clacy (diarist), cited in Susan Lawrence, "Households on Australian goldfields" in Penelope M. Allison (ed.), The Archaeology of Household Activities, London: Routledge, 1999, ‘a block of wood forms a table, and this is the only furniture; many dispense with that. The bedding, which is laid on the ground, serves to sit upon. Tin plates and pannikins… compose the tea service.’

   Scarcely had we got things fixed and supper under weigh, when a yell from Boteler, 'He's going to spout!' caused us to drop teapot and pannikin, and tumble out of the tent in half no time.

   1876, Earl of Dunraven, The Great Divide: Travels in the Upper Yellowstone in the Summer of 1874, London: Chatto and Windus, page 265

   A stout Burmese woman, wife of a constable, was kneeling outside the cage ladling rice and watery dahl into tin pannikins.

   1934, George Orwell, Burmese Days

   It is all bound up in my mind with the winter cold, the ragged uniforms of militiamen, the oval Spanish faces, the morse-like tapping of machine-guns, the smells of urine and rotting bread, the tinny taste of bean-stews wolfed hurriedly out of unclean pannikins.

   1938 April, George Orwell [pseudonym; Eric Arthur Blair], Homage to Catalonia, London: Secker & Warburg, →OCLC

   The peasants and their wives came to the doors of their cottages. Some brought out pannikins of water to the fleeing Jews; others laughed and jeered.

   1950, Isaac Bashevis Singer, translated by A.H. Gross, The Family Moskat, New York: Knopf, Part V, Chapter 1, p. 258

2. The contents of such a vessel.

   “[…] Put the billy on the fire, Jimmy, and we’ll drink him a good voyage in half a pannikin of tea before we turn in.”

   1903, Ernest W. Hornung, chapter 18, in Denis Dent, New York: Frederck A. Stokes, page 183