Waitresses

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. Personnel in eateries who provide meals and drinks to guests
2. Females working in food service who take customer orders and deliver items
3. Women who serve food and beverages to customers in dining establishments

Etymology: "Waitresses" is the plural of "waitress," so the story belongs to the base word, which is "waiter" plus the feminine suffix "-ess." That suffix has travelled a long road. It goes back to Ancient Greek endings like "-issa," which marked feminine forms, and it passed into Late Latin and then Old French as "-esse." English picked it up in the Middle English period and kept it as "-ess," a productive ending used for female equivalents of many nouns, such as "actress" and "hostess." Waiter itself is a plain English formation, from "wait" in its older sense of attending on someone at table. The female version followed the common pattern of adding "-ess" to a masculine noun, so "waitress" is a compound-style coinage in English rather than a separate inherited word.