Glassware refers to objects made from glass, especially containers used for drinking, serving, or storing food and beverages. When you set a dinner table with drinking glasses, wine glasses, and perhaps a glass pitcher for water, you're arranging glassware. A restaurant kitchen contains cabinets full of glassware: tumblers for juice, tall glasses for iced tea, and stemmed glasses for fancy occasions.

The term also includes glass items used in laboratories and science experiments. In a chemistry lab, beakers, test tubes, flasks, and graduated cylinders are all laboratory glassware. Scientists choose glass for these tools because you can see through it to watch reactions happen, it doesn't react with most chemicals, and it can handle high temperatures.

Glass itself is made by heating sand and other minerals until they melt, then cooling the mixture quickly so it becomes hard and transparent. The result is a material that's been essential to human civilization for thousands of years. From the glass windows that light our homes to the microscope lenses that revealed the existence of cells, glassware has helped us see, measure, and understand our world more clearly.