Takeaway

How to spell takeaway

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce takeaway

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does takeaway mean?

1. nounA cooked meal bought from a restaurant to be eaten somewhere else, typically at home.
2. nounThe main conclusion or lesson that one draws from a meeting, report, or experience.

Takeaway in a sentence

• After the long shift they ordered a takeaway instead of cooking.

• The key takeaway from the report was that costs had to fall.

• The new takeaway on the high street sells curries and noodles.

• Her main takeaway from the workshop was to plan further ahead.

Where does takeaway come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

This is a native English compound built from two very old Germanic words. 'Take' came into English from the Old Norse 'taka', meaning 'to grasp or lay hold of', which displaced the older Old English 'niman' during the Viking settlements. 'Away' descends from the Old English phrase 'on weg', literally 'on the way' or 'off', which over centuries was compressed into a single adverb. The two were welded together as a noun in the twentieth century: the food sense, describing a hot meal carried off the premises, grew popular in British English from the 1960s, while the figurative sense of a main point one 'takes away' from a meeting or article rose in the later twentieth century. Because both halves are spelled exactly as the ordinary words 'take' and 'away', the only real trap is remembering that it closes up into one solid word rather than two.

How the word is built

• take (verb)
• away (adverb), joined as a compound noun