I think "take" worked. Sierra games had extremely limited vocabularies, of course. The Infocom games and later those by Magnetic Scrolls were much more advanced

I think "take" worked. Sierra games had extremely limited vocabularies, of course. The Infocom games and later those by Magnetic Scrolls were much more advanced at natural language parsing; you could type "put key in bottle", and if you had several bottles it would ask you "Which bottle?" and you could simply answer "the green bottle". Wish I could think of more examples, but it's been a long time.