A kettle boils the water; a teapot brews the tea. You fill the kettle, let it whistle or click off, then pour the hot water into the teapot over the leaves or bag. One heats, the other steeps.
The core difference
A kettle is for boiling water, while a teapot is for brewing and pouring tea from that water.
- kettle — a container with a spout used for boiling water: She put the kettle on as soon as guests arrived.
- teapot — a container with a handle, spout and lid, used for brewing and pouring tea: She poured the tea straight from the teapot into small cups.
How to tell them apart
The order of use is the clearest way to separate them. The kettle comes first: it heats plain water to boiling point, whether on a stovetop or as an electric appliance. The teapot comes second: the boiled water is poured over tea leaves or a tea bag inside it, where the tea steeps before being poured out into cups.
The teapot's name is a simple compound of "tea" and "pot", reflecting exactly what it is for. A kettle has a much older history, tracing back through Old English and Old Norse words for a vessel, and even has a modern figurative sense in policing, where officers "kettle" a crowd by confining it in a tight cordon, comparing the trapped crowd to water contained in a kettle.
