What happened to the n in restaurateur?
73 comments
·February 24, 2025burkaman
jasonpeacock
I'm sure it's on every cookbook/restaurant/food editor's list of top things to correct.
arantius
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=restaura...
Similar in Google trends, but
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=r...
Much smaller difference, when limited to the USA.
tome
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).
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).
thaumasiotes
I should note that in Latin the masculine agentive suffix is definitely -or. It may look like -tor, but that -t- is actually a separate element marking the perfect passive participle form. (From which agent nouns are derived.)
Most verbs have a passive participial form that includes the -t-, but in some it's been swallowed by an S. The only example that comes to mind is missus [sent], the passive participle of mittere [send]. The modern French verb is apparently mettre. I guess if the agent nouns are formed from that root, they should be metteur and mettrice? But if they descend from Latin, the masculine form might not use -tt-.
I feel pretty safe in saying that "sender" would be missor in Latin - it's an attested (though "very rare") word - but I have no instinct for what the feminine form would be. Missrix just doesn't feel right.
capitainenemo
Yeah, I don't feel like there's any strong rule on these things apart from "what sounds good" unless the male ending exists like -ien
I've heard at various times in my life the various feminine endings applied to same profession - people playing around with what sounds good or a generational thing. -esse -ice -enne -euse
There's also the debate in gendered languages over whether one should never use feminine endings on professions, and keep them generic, or always use them for all professions for consistency, avoiding suggesting certain professions are male vs female, while ensuring women are visible in professions where they used to be rarer.
CRConrad
> arnaqu-eur/-euse
WTF is that? And more importantly, can I get an armagnaqueur to keep me topped up?
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.
banannaise
You consult a restorator, who gives you a restorant!
CRConrad
If you sweat you're a perspirator, not a perspirantor -- a sweater, not a sweanter -- but you still use an antiperspirant against sweating. See how "sweating" also has an 'n' in it, but "sweater" doesn't? The -ant is just the French version of -ing.
hoseja
It makes perfect sense?
Let's be a little cheeky and invent analogues. Try for example "color".
person that does coloring - colorer
thing that does coloring - colorant
null
api_or_ipa
With “adult” (meaning violate, dilute, or extramaritally fornicate)
Person that does adultering: adulterer Thing that does adultering: adulterant
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.
psini
I don't know your french level but perhaps you read your quote too fast because it says: "Mets qui vient après les hors-d'œuvre et AVANT le plat principal". So the "entrée" is the dish that comes BEFORE the main dish.
CRConrad
Perhaps you read GP's quote too fast? Because it ends with:
>>>> Par extension. Plat principal. Un repas composé d’un hors-d’œuvre, une entrée et un dessert.
"By extension. Main dish. A meal consisting of an appetizer, an entrée and a dessert."
There the "entrée" is clearly the "main dish".
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.
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.")
em-bee
if hunger is a medical condition, a restaurant is a clinic for treating hunger, fast food is the emergency room, and a supermarket is the pharmacy.
the question is, is the treatment covered by insurance?
bombcar
Based on the other comment, maybe it's why many (most?) sodas we have today come from being marketed as cure-alls.
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.
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.
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.
amyjess
I believe the term is "short order" for when you have dishes cooked to order.
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.
CRConrad
> Since ancient times there were places where you could pay for food, but that was always a side business of an establishment
I don't think that's correct: They've excavated fast-food joints from under the ashes of Pompeii. There's nothing to say a business like that needs to be a side hustle of anything else.
chongli
Street food vendors go back millennia. They’ve never been called restaurants but they’ve always been in the primary business of selling food.
The main difference a restaurant brings is the addition of a seating / dining space. I strongly doubt that extra space for patrons to eat is a recent innovation.
peterlada
Coffee is Ethiopia, came with the Ottomans to Europe, tea came from Chine with the British or the Silk Road. Either of them post dates the Romans.
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.
SoleilAbsolu
Haha - until reading this I thought it was "restaurauteur" like a control-freak film director who makes food. Since most restauraunts don't end up making money it could more appropriately be "restauramateur".
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.
Tracnac
Yes "Restauratrice" is a perfect valid french word. So don't really understand the 'thankfully'...
fsckboy
seems to me it should be restaurateuse, like masseuse is to masseur.
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.txthoistbypetard
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!
hughdbrown
> 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.
llsf
Since we are talking about spelling, it is "hors d'œuvre" and not "hors d'oeuvre".
On macos: Option + q for œ
capitainenemo
In Linux w/ XCmpose or similar, or Hacker's Keyboard on Android, or Wincompose on Windows it is also the compose key then oe. XCompose also has a lot of customisable digraph support. See Kragen's list.
So. <compose>oe = œ
I usually bind capslock to the compose key in Linux (and Windows with Wincompose). Hacker's Keyboard has a dedicated button.
msk-lywenn
On a french macOS keyboard, it's option + o, which makes more sense, imho. What does option+o do on yours?
quesera
Option + o yields: ø in the textarea box.
... and then, in my Firefox configuration, unexpectedly navigates me to HN's /show page.
FWIW, Option + O yields: Ø ... and then performs the same navigation.
msk-lywenn
That makes sense too! I guess ø is actually more used than œ except for the french. ø is on option+0 btw, they didn't move it very far.
karaterobot
FWIW, the only way I now how to do this is:
Press Opt-o, then let go of opt. Then select the œ, which happens to be option 6.
null
kgwgk
“Also, remember that the word is pronounced like it is spelled.”
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....