What happened to the n in restaurateur?
43 comments
·February 24, 2025tome
msk-lywenn
The verb is restaurer. Its gerund form is restaurant (ie. transforming a verb into a noun) Restaurateur is also a noun but its the job associated with the verb, not the verb transformed into a noun directly.
thaumasiotes
Huh, the article immediately suggests a related question to me:
> BTW, the feminine version of a restaurateur was “restauratrice.”
That makes perfect sense, since the feminine agentive suffix in Latin is -rix. But I thought the feminine agentive ending in French was -euse! Where did we get "masseuse"?
Wiktionary suggests that -euse is an alternate equivalent of -rice, derived from Latin -osus (which has no agentive meaning at all; it means "full of [whatever]", and transformed into a French agentive suffix by people who felt that -eur and -euse must be related because they sound so similar.
forty
I cannot really come up with a good rule, but I notice that words in -teur seem to have a féminin in -trice (restaura-teur/-trice, ama-teur/-trice, institu-teur/-trice, anima-teur/-trice) while other -eur words seem to prefer -euse (mass-eur/-euse, football-eur/-euse, arnaqu-eur/-euse).
banannaise
You consult a restorator, who gives you a restorant!
burkaman
This is wild, I have read this word many times but never consciously noticed that there is no N there. I would have bet money that "restauranteur" is the more common spelling in practice, but I'm completely wrong: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=restaurateur%2....
jasonpeacock
I'm sure it's on every cookbook/restaurant/food editor's list of top things to correct.
jauco
This just pushes the question one step further. Why did the chefs who used to be employed by aristocrats, when they started opening public eating places. Not call them auberge (french for tavern or inn) or cantine or hotel or bistrot or even cabaret (which used to mean small restaurant) but instead picked ‘restaurant’ an, at that time, medical term.
wahern
Based on https://www.etymonline.com/word/restaurateur and https://parisfoodhistory.blogspot.com/2018/06/what-were-very... is seems the choice of wording was one part legal hack and one part marketing gimmick.
TL;DR: Apparently only traiteurs were permitted to sell meals. Restaurants were marketed as a kind of (I guess) upscale health service, originally only selling fancy broths. One of the early restaurateurs is documented as using the advertisement, "Venite ad me omnes qui stomacho laboratis, & ego restaurabo vos" ("Come to me, all of you whose stomachs are in distress, and I will restore you", an allusion to Matthew 11:28, "Come to Me, all of you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.")
bombcar
Based on the other comment, maybe it's why many (most?) sodas we have today come from being marketed as cure-alls.
AnotherGoodName
Do they also ask for the meaning of entree in this test?
Even Miriam Webster has a note that Americans mistakenly use it for main course (completely incorrectly) because French sounds fancier.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/entr%C3%A9e#:~:te...
Clamchop
English has borrowed French words a lot. It has often imported the same word multiple times, and they frequently have different meanings.
Including entrée, incidentally, which gave us the entrée and the entry.
Even in France, in the context of elaborate multiple course meals, the entrée eventually stopped being the very first thing that was served. Soup started to take that spot, and gave us what we now call the appetizer, which used to be chiefly soup or salad but now could be almost anything.
For those elaborate meals, the entrée was just the first course of the multiple courses that were the "main" dish.
Separate main courses have largely fallen out of fashion, and they collapsed into one plate with a serving of each. This is still the entrée in the US and Canada, and that makes perfect sense, given the history.
So no, it wasn't just that it sounded fancier.
kgwgk
> completely incorrectly
That meaning is also accepted by the French Academy nowadays:
Fig. En parlant d’une période de temps, d’un processus. Commencement, début. À l’entrée de l’hiver. Dès l’entrée du repas. Par métonymie. Mets qui vient après les hors-d’œuvre et précède le plat principal. Une entrée chaude, froide. Servir un vol-au-vent, un soufflé en entrée. Par extension. Plat principal. Un repas composé d’un hors-d’œuvre, une entrée et un dessert.
plaguuuuuu
I had no idea it was used for main course in the US, that's wild. This would be very, very confusing for Australians (probably Brits as well)
LudwigNagasena
Semantic drift is not "incorrect".
karaterobot
At first it's a mistake, then eventually it's not.
idoubtit
Since about half the English words come from Latin, mostly through French, there are many cases of -ant and -ator in the English language. So I thought that most American adults knew that -ant is like -ing (see "migrant"), and that -ator is a role (see "gladiator").
Here are words of this kind, like "applicant"/"applicator":
officiant inhalant applicant aspirant fumigant coagulant communicant contaminant lubricant litigant participant refrigerant resonant radiant celebrant defoliant desiccant discriminant vibrant
This list was built with:
grep -E "^($(grep -E 'ator$' wordlist_en.txt | perl -pe 's/ator\n/ant|/'))\$" wordlist_en.txt
aspell -d en dump master | aspell -l en expand | perl -pe 's/\s/\n/g;' > wordlist_en.txthughdbrown
> This puzzler, like many other difficult-to-spell food terms (such as hors d’oeuvre), also has its derivation in the French language.
That's the whole story: people who don't know French (or any foreign language, likely) cannot spell a French word.
jjgreen
Bouleuques.
jasonpeacock
Fascinating history - I didn't realize that restaurants were so recent.
But language evolves to follow common use, and "restauranteur" is also correct:
decimalenough
The term is recent. Places where you can pay for food are ancient.
tetromino_
I'm not sure about that. Since ancient times there were places where you could pay for food, but that was always a side business of an establishment whose main purpose was either (a) selling alcohol (or, in some places, coffee or tea) or (b) providing lodging for travelers.
I suspect that an establishment whose main purpose is selling food to order may be a fairly recent innovation.
burkaman
It is pretty well accepted that Pompeii had businesses that primarily served prepared food (https://pompeiisites.org/en/comunicati/the-ancient-snack-bar...), so they are at least 2000 years old.
Also, a business that sells meals and also sells lodging or coffee is definitely still a restaurant.
neitsa
Not sure if it would fit the definition of a restaurant we have today but a thermopolium was a shop where you would buy food. I'm not sure how widespread the concept was, though.
thaumasiotes
> I suspect that an establishment whose main purpose is selling food to order may be a fairly recent innovation.
It's not; every city has always had them. Food is actually far more important than alcohol is.
jasonpeacock
I was thinking about that... Is there a distinction between a restaurant where you can order specific dishes (made to order?) vs a place where you just got whatever is available?
jauco
In the netherlands we use the french term ‘a la carte’ to mean that the restaurant allows you to pick a pre-defined set of dishes. As opposed to having a daily changing menu with maybe a choice between meat/fish/vegetarian which is called “table d’hote” but the latter has gotten a connotation of being less fancy. So if a fancy restaurant does table d’hote they generally call it ‘our concept’ and explain it to every guest as if it’s a unique thing.
I’m guessing the french use the same words. And maybe some english speaking countries as well? Given how pervasive french is around restaurants.
amyjess
I believe the term is "short order" for when you have dishes cooked to order.
giraffe_lady
Not anymore in english, because the second went basically completely extinct except a few location- or activity-specific exceptions like food trucks and sport concessions.
hoistbypetard
Damn. My French is pretty solid, and used to be good enough to do well in masters-level French literature classes at a French university in France, back when I was studying that kind of thing on a full-time basis. (I’m a native speaker of American English.)
I’d have incorrectly spelled it with the N when speaking English. When speaking French, the word restaurateur, in my experience, has generally referred to someone who restores things like artworks or buildings. When referring to someone who owns a restaurant, we’d have *always* said propriétaire.
cocoto
No, restaurateur is often used here in France, simply for someone owning a business and working in “restauration”. When using restaurateur instead of propriétaire we are emphasizing the work, because someone can be the owner without actually managing/working in it.
forty
Yeah I never heard "le propriétaire" especially used for a restaurant owners.
Personally this is the first definition that come to my mind when seeing the word restaurateur, before artwork/building restaurateurs.
hoistbypetard
I suppose I'm showing my age, or the biases of the space I lived/worked in, then!
kristjank
> BTW, the feminine version of a restaurateur was “restauratrice.” The term was used in the mid to late 18th century, but thankfully never caught on.
I don't know why the thankfully was needed. It looks like a pretty word to me.
fsckboy
seems to me it should be restaurateuse, like masseuse is to masseur.
llsf
Since we are talking about spelling, it is "hors d'œuvre" and not "hors d'oeuvre".
On macos: Option + q for œ
msk-lywenn
[delayed]
troad
Akshually, since the Latin alphabet is just a misdrawn Greek alphabet, and the Greek alphabet is just a malformed Phoenician adjad, which is just Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs full of errors, it really should be... etc etc /s
Language changes. Celebrate the vibrancy! I love me some horsy derps.
kgwgk
“Also, remember that the word is pronounced like it is spelled.”
This is just begging the question! So "restaurateur" was first, but did "restaurant" get an "n"? Why isn't it "restaurat"? The reason is that in French (ultimately from Latin) "-ateur" means "person who" and "-ant" means roughly "ing". So a "restaurater" is someone who restores and "restaurant" means "restoring" (i.e. a restoring soup, subsequently place).