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dumbwaiter

dumb·wait·er/ˈdʌmˌweɪtəɹ/noun

dumbwaiter is a noun meaning “A small elevator used to move food etc. from one floor of a building to another” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled D-U-M-B-W-A-I-T-E-R and has 3 syllables (dumb·wait·er), and it appears about once in every 17 million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data). The plural of dumbwaiter is dumbwaiters.

What does dumbwaiter mean?

noun

  1. 1

    A small elevator used to move food etc. from one floor of a building to another.

  2. 2

    obsoleteA table or set of trays on rollers used for serving food.

  3. 3

    obsoleteA lazy Susan.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How do you pronounce dumbwaiter?

  • US /ˈdʌmˌweɪtəɹ/

Dumbwaiter has 3 syllables, split dumb·wait·er in writing.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: En-ca-dumbwaiter.oga, LL-Q1860_(eng)-Naomi_Persephone_Amethyst_(NaomiAmethyst)-dumbwaiter.wav, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).

Forms of dumbwaiter

  • dumbwaiters plural
  • dumb waiter
  • dumb-waiter

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How common is dumbwaiter?

Dumbwaiter appears about once in every 17 million words in written English, the 122,704th most frequent word form in the list.

Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).

Dumbwaiter in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese

In the sense small elevator:

LanguageWords
Frenchmonte-plat, monte-plats
GermanSpeisenaufzug, Speiseaufzug
Portuguesecriado-mudo
Spanishmontaplatos

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Translations are Wiktionary's, by sense; a linked word has its own PlainSpell page.

Where does dumbwaiter come from?

From dumb (“unable to speak”) + waiter, originally separate words and describing the portable table's inability to relate gossip after the meal. By the use of the term to describe small service elevators in American homes in the 1840s, it simply meant dumb as “mechanical”, “unable to speak at all”.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).