Waitstaff

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. Personnel who provide food and drink services to customers in dining locations
2. Individuals employed to serve food and beverages to patrons in restaurants or similar establishments
3. Staff members responsible for taking and delivering orders of food and drinks to customers in dining venues

Etymology: "Waitstaff" is a plain compound, built from "wait" and "staff," and its story is mostly about how each half came to mean what it does here. "Wait" comes from the old sense of watching or attending on someone, as in a servant who waited on a household, and "staff" once meant a stick or rod, later a body of people working together under a shared task. Put together, the word describes a group of people who attend to diners in a restaurant. The sense of "wait" as serving at table is older than its sense of pausing, and it still survives in phrases like "wait on" a customer. Waitstaff keeps that original idea of attending to others, which is why the word fits people who bring food and refill glasses rather than people who merely linger.

Synonyms: servers, staff

Antonyms: customers