Parts of a Spray Bottle – Trigger, Nozzle, Piston, Dip Tube

All 9 parts on the diagram

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The whole bottle 5

Nozzle A small hole that shapes the liquid as it leaves. On many sprayers it turns, to choose a stream or a spray or to shut off.
Trigger Pulling it back pushes the piston into the cylinder.
Closure It holds the whole sprayer onto the neck of the bottle.
Dip tube Reaches to the bottle's bottom. The liquid is drawn up through it.
Bottle The reservoir the sprayer draws from.

Inside the sprayer 4

Cylinder Its space shrinks when the piston pushes in. That forces liquid out. It grows when the piston comes back, which sucks liquid in.
Piston The main moving part of the pump. It slides into the cylinder and back out.
Spring The piston squeezes it. When the trigger is let go, it pushes the piston back out.
One-way valve A tiny ball resting on a seat. Suction lifts it to let liquid in; pressure pushes it shut, so the liquid can only go on toward the nozzle.

How this list was compiled: Every name checked on 2026-09-30, a name kept only where two independent sources name the part: HowStuffWorks, How do spray bottles pump fluid?, read in the Internet Archive copy of https://home.howstuffworks.com/question673.htm (trigger lever, pump, plastic tube, reservoir, nozzle, piston, cylinder, spring, the one-way valve made of a small ball on a seat); Wikipedia, text only, Spray bottle, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spray_bottle (bottle, trigger-style actuator, pump, siphon tube, nozzle); a packaging supplier's component guides, https://www.oberk.com/packaging-crash-course/whats-inside-a-fine-mist-sprayer and https://www.oberk.com/packaging-crash-course/whats-inside-a-lotion-pump (closure, gasket, housing, piston, spring, ball, dip tube); and Wikipedia, Soap dispenser, Parts (closure, housing, dip tube, spring, ball, piston). Cylinder is one source's word for the chamber; the supplier calls it the housing, which is accepted. Hints and detail lines are in our own words. Licence: own work

The drawing: Drawn for this site on 2026-09-30 from plain geometry; no maker's sprayer, nothing traced. Licence: own work

How it works

A trigger spray bottle is a small hand pump on top of a bottle. The first drawing names the outside; the second cuts the sprayer head open to show the pump.

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What one squeeze does

Pulling the trigger pushes the piston into the cylinder and squeezes the spring. The liquid in the cylinder is forced along to the nozzle. When the trigger is let go, the spring pushes the piston back out, and the growing space sucks more liquid up the dip tube, past the one-way valve.

Why a new bottle takes a few squeezes

At first there is only air in the cylinder and in the dip tube. It takes a few strokes to drive that air out before liquid reaches the nozzle.

The arrows on the second drawing show the way the liquid goes; they are not parts.
Packaging suppliers call the chamber the housing. Both names are accepted for the cylinder.

Questions and answers

What are the parts of a spray bottle called?

Outside: the bottle, the closure that screws the sprayer on, the trigger and the nozzle, with a dip tube reaching down inside. Inside the sprayer: a piston in a cylinder, a spring and a one-way valve.

What is the tube inside a spray bottle called?

The dip tube. It reaches from the sprayer to the bottle's bottom, and the pump draws the liquid up through it. Some sources call it a siphon tube.

How does the pump in a spray bottle work?

It is a piston pump. Squeezing the trigger pushes a piston into a cylinder and forces liquid out through the nozzle; a spring pushes the piston back, which sucks more liquid up from the bottle.

What does the ball inside a sprayer do?

It is a one-way valve. The ball rests on a seat where the liquid comes in. Suction lifts it to let liquid up; pressure pushes it shut, so the liquid cannot run back into the bottle.