Everyday LifeGreek → English
Platter
/ˈplætər/noun
A large shallow dish for serving food.
The Greek roots
πλατύς
platýs
broad, flat
Literally: “the flat thing”
Follow a root:πλατύς4 words
The story of the word
A platter is, at bottom, a flat. Vulgar Latin plattus, borrowed from Greek πλατύς, gave Old French plat, a flat dish, and Anglo-Norman plater reached English by the fourteenth century. Plate, plateau and plaza come from the same broad root, and so does the vinyl sense of platter that disc jockeys kept alive into the 1970s.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Vulgar Latin → Old French → English
- First recorded
- 14th century
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
plateplateauplazaplatypus
In a sentence
She carried the fish out on a long white platter and everyone stopped talking.