Serving

How to spell serving

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce serving

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does serving mean?

1. nounA single quantity of food or drink dished out for one person at one time.
2. verbPresent participle of serve: presently performing service, supplying, or attending to someone.

Serving in a sentence

• noun

  The recipe makes enough for one generous serving per guest.

• verb

  The waiter was serving drinks to the corner table all evening.

• noun

  Each serving of cereal contains roughly two hundred calories.

• verb

  The new bridge is serving thousands of commuters every day.

Where does serving come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word grows from the verb 'serve', which English took from Old French 'servir' in the 1200s, itself descended from the Latin 'servire', meaning 'to be a servant' or 'to be enslaved'. That Latin verb came from 'servus', the word for a slave or bondsman, so the earliest sense was the lowly act of waiting on another person. Over the centuries the meaning broadened from menial attendance to the dignified ideas of bringing food to a table and performing a duty for others. The '-ing' ending then turned the verb into both an ongoing action and a countable thing: a single helping of food dished out at one time. Because the root is simply 'serve' plus '-ing', the spelling keeps the silent-free, regular pattern, with no doubling of the final consonant since the stress and the vowel-plus-e ending do not call for it.

How the word is built

• serv- (from Latin servire: to serve)
• -ing (noun/participle suffix)