Cafeteria
nounA restaurant, often in a school, hospital, or workplace, where customers collect their meals from a counter and carry them to a table.
How to spell cafeteria
9 letters · 5 syllables
How to pronounce cafeteria
Say the part in capitals loudest.
What does cafeteria mean?
- nounA restaurant, often in a school, hospital, or workplace, where customers collect their meals from a counter and carry them to a table.
Cafeteria in a sentence
-
The hospital staff ate lunch in the ground-floor cafeteria.
-
Students lined up at the cafeteria counter to choose their meals.
Where does cafeteria come from?
Language of origin: Spanish
This word came into English from American Spanish cafeteria, which meant 'a coffee shop' or 'a place where coffee is sold'. It was built on cafe, the Spanish word for 'coffee', plus the suffix -eria, which marks a shop or place where a trade is carried on (the same ending sits behind words like 'panaderia', a bakery). Cafe itself traces back through French and Italian to Turkish kahve and ultimately Arabic qahwa, the name of the drink. English borrowed cafeteria in the United States during the late 1800s, when it described a self-service restaurant, and the meaning quickly settled on a place where diners collect their own food from a counter. The American Spanish -teria ending was so catchy that it spawned imitations such as 'washeteria', which is partly why the single-r, single-f spelling can feel uncertain to write today.
How the word is built
- cafe (coffee)
- -teria (Spanish suffix marking a place of business)
Fix your spelling for good.
Spelling Garden finds the words you personally get wrong, plants them in a garden, and brings each one back just before you would have forgotten it.
Just five minutes a day is all it takes to fix your spelling.