Buffet

How to spell buffet

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce buffet

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does buffet mean?

1. nounA meal where dishes are laid out for guests to serve themselves.
2. verbTo strike or knock about repeatedly, as by wind or waves.

Buffet in a sentence

• noun

  The hotel buffet included fresh fruit, pastries, and hot eggs.

• verb

  Strong gusts began to buffet the small fishing boat.

• noun

  Guests lined up at the wedding buffet to fill their plates.

• verb

  The storm continued to buffet the coastline through the night.

Where does buffet come from?

Language of origin: French

This single spelling actually carries two different stories that happen to have collided. The meal sense comes from the French buffet, which originally named a sideboard or side table on which food and drink were displayed; by the eighteenth century the word had come to mean the spread of dishes laid out for guests to serve themselves, and English borrowed it in that fashionable French sense, keeping the silent French ending so that it is pronounced 'buh-fay'. The striking sense has an older and separate route: it descends from the Old French buffet, a diminutive of bufe meaning 'a blow or slap', so a buffet was literally a little smack. That older verb entered English in the medieval period and is why we say the wind can buffet a ship. Because the two words look identical on the page but sound completely different, the spelling trap is remembering that one quiet little form has to cover both 'buh-fay' and 'BUFF-it'.

How the word is built

• From French buffet; in the strike sense, buff- (a blow)
• -et (diminutive)