bottoms

1. 1
   nounplural

   The lower, pants-like part of a paired set of clothing, such as pajamas, tracksuits, or bikinis.

   He grabbed a pair of fleece bottoms from the drawer on the cold morning.

   The store sold the bikini tops and bottoms separately so customers could mix sizes.

   Similartrousers, pants

   Oppositetops

   Note

   A plural-only noun, like trousers or shorts: one garment, plural grammar. You say these bottoms are too long, never this bottom is, and you count them with pair: two pairs of pajama bottoms. It is most at home after a word naming the outfit, such as pajama, tracksuit, bikini or fleece. Its natural partner is tops, the upper half of the same set.

2. 2
   noun

   Plural of bottom.

   The bottoms of the wells had filled with silt over the years.

   Sailors charted the muddy bottoms of the harbor before docking.

   Note

   The ordinary counting plural works for any meaning of the singular: the bottoms of wells and jars, the lowest places in several rankings, or the home team's half of more than one inning in baseball. Here the -s always means more than one. Keep it apart from the plural-only clothing word, where bottoms names a single garment even though it looks plural.

3. 3
   verb

   Third-person singular simple present of bottom.

   The reservoir bottoms out during the driest months of the year.

   Whenever the suspension bottoms on a deep pothole, the car jolts hard.

   Note

   The present-tense -s form covers both the transitive and the intransitive uses of the verb. A bartender bottoms a glass by pouring in the spirits before the soda. A bed of clay bottoms a lake when it lies beneath it. In older English an idea could bottom on its premises, but that intransitive 'be grounded' use is now obsolete. Because the noun plural has the same spelling, only the sentence tells them apart.

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