Diner

How to spell diner

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce diner

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does diner mean?

1. nounA small, casual restaurant, typically American, serving inexpensive meals.
2. nounA person who is eating a meal, especially at a restaurant.

Diner in a sentence

• The roadside diner served pancakes and coffee until midnight.

• Each diner was handed a menu as soon as they sat down.

• They stopped at a chrome-fronted diner off the highway for breakfast.

• The restaurant can seat one hundred diner at a time.

Where does diner come from?

Language of origin: French

This word is built from the verb 'dine' plus the suffix '-er', and 'dine' itself came into English in the 1200s from the Old French disner, meaning 'to dine' or 'to take the first meal of the day'. That Old French verb is thought to descend from a Late Latin form disjejunare, literally 'to break one's fast', from dis- (undo) and jejunus (fasting), the same fasting root that gives us 'jejune'. A 'diner' began simply as a person who is dining. In the United States during the late 1800s the word was applied to a railway dining car, and because early roadside eateries were often built to resemble those long, narrow rail cars, 'diner' became the familiar name for a casual American restaurant. The single 'n' and the long first vowel keep it distinct from 'dinner', the evening meal, which doubles the 'n' and shortens the vowel.

How the word is built

• dine (from Old French disner: to dine)
• -er (agent/object noun suffix)