A coal scuttle, sometimes spelled coalscuttle and also called a hod, is a bucket

Bucket

A bucket, also called a pail, is typically a watertight, vertical cylinder or truncated cone, with an open top and a flat bottom, usually attached to a semicircular carrying handle called the bail. A pail can have an open top or can have a lid....

-like container for holding a small, intermediate supply of coal

Coal

Coal is a combustible black or brownish-black sedimentary rock usually occurring in rock strata in layers or veins called coal beds or coal seams. The harder forms, such as anthracite coal, can be regarded as metamorphic rock because of later exposure to elevated temperature and pressure...

 convenient to an indoor coal-fired stove or heater. It is usually made of metal and shaped like a vertical cylinder

Cylinder (geometry)

A cylinder is one of the most basic curvilinear geometric shapes, the surface formed by the points at a fixed distance from a given line segment, the axis of the cylinder. The solid enclosed by this surface and by two planes perpendicular to the axis is also called a cylinder...

 or truncated

Truncation (geometry)

In geometry, a truncation is an operation in any dimension that cuts polytope vertices, creating a new facet in place of each vertex.- Uniform truncation :...

 cone

Cone (geometry)

A cone is an n-dimensional geometric shape that tapers smoothly from a base to a point called the apex or vertex. Formally, it is the solid figure formed by the locus of all straight line segments that join the apex to the base...

, with the open top slanted for pouring coal on a fire. It may have one or two handles. Homes that don't use coal sometimes use a coal scuttle decoratively.

The word scuttle comes, via Middle English and Old English, from the Latin word Scutlla, meaning a shallow pan.