Cater

How to spell cater

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce cater

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does cater mean?

1. verbTo provide and serve food and drink for an event or group of people.
2. verbTo provide what is wanted or needed by a particular group or audience, usually used with 'for' or 'to'.

Cater in a sentence

• A local firm will cater the wedding reception for two hundred guests.

• The new magazine aims to cater for readers interested in vintage cars.

• They hired a company to cater the office party.

• The resort tries to cater to families with young children.

Where does cater come from?

Language of origin: French

Cater began life as the now obsolete noun 'cater', meaning a person who buys provisions for a household. That noun was itself a shortened form of the older 'acater' or 'acatour', borrowed from Anglo-Norman French acatour, meaning 'a buyer', from the verb acater 'to buy' (which survives in modern French as acheter). The trail runs back to a Late Latin form accaptare, built from the prefix ad- 'to' and captare 'to seize or grasp', a frequentative of capere 'to take', the same root that gives us 'capture' and 'capable'. By the late sixteenth century English speakers had turned this noun for a household provisioner into the verb 'to cater', meaning to supply food, and from there into the broader sense of providing whatever is wanted. The single t and the plain -er ending are the spelling points worth fixing, since the word can look as though it should double a letter the way 'catter' might.

How the word is built

• cat- (from acater: to buy provisions)
• -er (agentive/verb ending)