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A shot glass is a small glass designed to hold or measure spirits or liquor, which is either drunk straight from the glass ("a shot") or poured into a cocktail. A "shot" of liquor is not the same as a "shooter".
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Shot glasses decorated with a wide variety of toasts, advertisements and humorous pictures are popular souvenirs and collectibles.
Name origin
Several examples also exist from the 1930s. However, although it was used by some, the term apparently did not come into common usage until much later.
Many references from the 1800s describe giving a jigger (2 US fl oz or 59 millilitres before Prohibition) of whiskey or rum to workers who were digging canals. Most shot glasses are found in the United States, but shot glasses from before the 1940s are very rare.
Earliest shot glasses
Some of the earliest small whiskey glasses in America from the late 1700s to early 1800s were called "whiskey tasters" or "whiskey tumblers" and were hand blown. They are thick similar to today's shot glasses but will show a pontil scar on the bottom or will show a cupped area on the bottom where the pontil scar was ground and polished off. Some of these glasses even have hand-applied handles and decorations hand cut by a grinding wheel.
In the early to mid-1800s, glass blowers began to use molds and several different patterns of "whiskey tasters" in several different colors were being made in molds. These glasses are also thick like today's shot glass but they will have rough pontiled bottoms from being hand blown into the mold. By the 1870s to 1890s as glass making technology improved, the rough pontiled bottoms largely disappeared from glasses and bottles.
Just before Prohibition in the U.S. in the late 1800s to early 1900s, thin-sided mass-produced whiskey glasses were common. Many of these glasses feature etched advertising on them. After Prohibition, these were replaced by shot glasses with a thick base and thick sides.
Jigger
A jigger or measure is a bartending tool used to measure liquor, which is typically then poured into a cocktail shaker. A traditional style of jigger is made of stainless steel with two unequal sized opposing cones in an hourglass shape on the end of a rod. Typically, one cone measures a regulation single shot, and the other some fraction or multiple—with the actual sizes depending on local laws and customs.
The jigger is named for the unit of liquid it typically measures, a jigger or shot, which is historically defined as 2 handfuls (2 fluid ounces) or 1⁄2 of a jack in the traditional binary submultiple (a.k.a. English doubling) system. This means that its actual volume varies between the U.K. and the U.S., and also varies over time, by manufacturer, and geographically, as this relationship has been forgotten. In the U.S. up until Prohibition, it was widely known to be 2.0 US fluid ounces (2.1 imp fl oz; 59 ml), but starting in the latter part of the 20th century, it is most commonly interpreted to be 1.5 US fluid ounces (1.6 imp fl oz; 44 ml).
However, bar jiggers come in other sizes and ratios, and may not actually measure a fluid jigger.
Kitchen shot
A small shot glass specifically marketed for kitchen use is graduated in units such as ounce and half ounce, teaspoons, tablespoons or possibly millilitres. They are useful for recipes that call for multiples of a smaller unit (e.g. several teaspoons), allowing the dispensing of the amount in a single measure.