Anatomy of a Glass Vial: International Edition

Hi everyone – this is a follow up to a call for assistance originally issued at the end of April of this year.  I asked for your help in pulling together the non-English equivalents for terms that I routinely use to describe the anatomy of a glass vial.  Why did I do this?  Anyone who has worked in this industry for a while knows that vial specifications don’t recognize borders.  On any given day, I might have to review documents provided by a pharma customer in the US, Brazil, Japan, France, etc., and there’s no guarantee that it will be in English (actually – the one from the US is probably in English, but I digress).  It seemed safe to assume that others might be stumbling their way through translating specifications not in their native language, and so I decided to start creating this glossary as an easily accessible online resource.

Table 1 includes everything that I have so far.  A few comments:

·       This compilation is by no means complete.  There are obviously many other languages not captured here, and so I’m hoping this initial post will encourage others to make further contributions, thereby expanding this resource intended for the global packaging community.

·       Some of these terms are best efforts at an educated guess.  In other cases, no obvious equivalent was available.  For example, I had more than one person say they didn’t have a term for “Footprint” (i.e., what I would call the portion of the vial that is in direct contact with the surface on which it is placed).  Please let me know if you have alternate suggestions or can fill in what is currently blank in Table 1.

·       One of the more interesting parts of this project was the unexpected learnings.  For example, the French terms for the neck of a vial include “Bague”, "Cou", and “Col”.  “Col” is apparently an older term.  I’m assuming for now that “Col” shares etymological roots with the English term “Collar” – more research is required.  Refer to the Footnotes section for additional items of interest.

·       Finally, I realized that my original request left out some important terms such as blowback and sealing surface.  Fortunately, a few people helpfully provided translations for these additional features.  I’ll need to go back and fill in these blanks as well for the other languages.

I’d like to thank everyone who generously helped me out so far with this project.  Once again, please feel free to contact me or leave your comments below if you have thoughts on how to improve or add to Table 1.  Finally, I’ll also direct you to the original “Anatomy of a Glass Vial” post if you’re interested in learning more about the functional importance of each of the regions covered above.

Footnotes

1.       “Col” is an older French term for the neck of a vial. It's not clear to me how prevalent its usage is relative to "Bague" and "Cou".

2.       My understanding is that “Moletage” and “Barrettes” refer to different footprint shapes found in molded glass vials.  Equivalent English translations might be “Knurling” and “Strip”, respectively.

3.       The Serbian term “Grlić” is used to describe the combination of the Flange and Neck regions.

4.       The Turkish terms “Flanş”, “Birlşme”, and “Noktasi” are used to describe the combination of the Flange and Neck regions.

5.       The Turkish terms “Etiket Alanı”, “Üst Gövde”, and “Alt Gövde” are also used to more specifically describe the “Label Area”, “Upper Body”, and “Lower Body” of a vial, respectively.