Funnel
pipe with a wide top and narrow bottom
A funnel is a tube or pipe that is wide at the top and narrow at the bottom, used for guiding liquid or powder into a small opening.
Funnels are usually made of stainless steel, aluminium, glass, or plastic. The material used in its construction should be sturdy enough to withstand the weight of the substance being transferred, and it should not react with the substance. For this reason, stainless steel or glass are useful in transferring diesel fuel, while plastic funnels are useful in the kitchen. Sometimes disposable paper funnels are used in cases where it would be difficult to adequately clean the funnel afterwards (for example, in adding motor oil into a car). Dropper funnels, also called dropping funnels or tap funnels, have a tap to allow the controlled release of a liquid. A flat funnel, made of polypropylene, utilises living hinges and flexible walls to fold flat.
The term "funnel" may refer to the chimney or smokestack on a steam locomotive and commonly refers to the same on a ship. The term funnel is also applied to other seemingly strange objects like a smoking pipe or a kitchen bin.
Laboratory funnels
There are many different kinds of funnels that have been adapted for specialised applications in the laboratory, such as filter funnels and thistle funnels (shaped like thistle flowers).
“Funnel” enters the record as pipe with a wide top and narrow bottom. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Funnel, pipe and wide can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 28, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q29957. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Funnel” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.