Canteen

How to spell canteen

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce canteen

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does canteen mean?

1. nounA restaurant or dining area provided for staff or students in a workplace, factory, or school.
2. nounA small container for carrying water or another drink, especially one used by soldiers or hikers.
3. nounA box or case fitted to hold a matching set of cutlery.

Canteen in a sentence

• The factory canteen serves hot meals at lunchtime.

• The soldier refilled his canteen from the stream.

• They received a polished canteen of silver cutlery as a wedding gift.

• Staff queued in the office canteen for coffee.

• She clipped a metal canteen to her backpack before the hike.

• The wooden canteen held a full set of forks, knives, and spoons.

Where does canteen come from?

Language of origin: Italian

This word travelled into English in the middle of the 1700s from the French cantine, which named a small store or sutler's shop that sold food and drink to soldiers in the field. The French word was itself borrowed from the Italian cantina, meaning a cellar or wine store, and that in turn grew out of canto, meaning a corner or angle, since a cellar was thought of as a tucked-away corner of a building. From the idea of a place that supplied refreshment came the modern sense of a dining room in a barracks, factory, or school, and from the supplies a soldier carried came the sense of a small flask for water. The doubled vowel spelling, -een, is simply the way English reshaped the French -ine ending so that it would sound and look natural; that is the chief spelling trap, since writers sometimes reach for -ine. The same Italian canto for corner also lies behind musical and architectural terms, a reminder of how far a humble word for a cellar corner has spread.

How the word is built

• cantin- (from Italian cantina: cellar, wine store)
• anglicised ending -een