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: <a href="https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=restaurateur%2Crestauranteur&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3" rel="nofollow">https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=restaurateur%2...</a>.
This is just begging the question! So "restaurateur" was first, but did "restaurant" <i>get</i> 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).
Do they also ask for the meaning of entree in this test?<p>Even Miriam Webster has a note that Americans mistakenly use it for main course (completely incorrectly) because French sounds fancier.<p><a href="https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/entr%C3%A9e#:~:text=As%20dining%20habits%20have%20changed,anything%20French%20always%20sounds%20elegant." rel="nofollow">https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/entr%C3%A9e#:~:te...</a>
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.
Fascinating history - I didn't realize that restaurants were so recent.<p>But language evolves to follow common use, and "restauranteur" is also correct:<p><a href="https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/restauranteur" rel="nofollow">https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/restauranteur</a>
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".
> 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.<p>I don't know why the thankfully was needed. It looks like a pretty word to me.
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").<p>Here are words of this kind, like "applicant"/"applicator":<p>officiant
inhalant
applicant
aspirant
fumigant
coagulant
communicant
contaminant
lubricant
litigant
participant
refrigerant
resonant
radiant
celebrant
defoliant
desiccant
discriminant
vibrant<p>This list was built with:<p><pre><code> grep -E "^($(grep -E 'ator$' wordlist_en.txt | perl -pe 's/ator\n/ant|/'))\$" wordlist_en.txt
</code></pre>
The words of common English come from:<p><pre><code> aspell -d en dump master | aspell -l en expand | perl -pe 's/\s/\n/g;' > wordlist_en.txt</code></pre>
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.)<p>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.
> This puzzler, like many other difficult-to-spell food terms (such as hors d’oeuvre), also has its derivation in the French language.<p>That's the whole story: people who don't know French (or any foreign language, likely) cannot spell a French word.
Mostly nonsense, because a restaurateur has nothing to do with restaurants. He repairs old things that last long, whilst a chef produces new volatile things that last short. And the etymology is hand-waving