Definition:
: a bottle emptied of beer, wine, or liquor; also : an empty beer can
Example:
"There were the champagne flasks which poor Jake Belsize had emptied; the tall seltzer-water bottle, from which the gases had issued and mingled with the hot air of the previous night's talk; glasses with dregs of liquor, ashes of cigars, or their black stumps, strewing the cloth; the dead men, the burst guns of yesterday's battle." – William Makepeace Thackeray, The Newcomes, 1855
About the Word:
Dead man (which has dead soldier as a sometime synonym) has been in use since at least the end of the 17th century, when it was recorded in the famous dictionary of slang A New Dictionary of the Canting Crew. Few writers have used this expression quite so eloquently as did Thackeray.
