Pylimitics

We’ve had to wait a long time for “wait” to be used the way it is today. You can “wait” for something, meaning to bide your time until an event, you can “wait” on something, such as a table at a restaurant, and you can simply “wait tables.” 

“Wait” originated as an old Germanic word that meant to watch or guard. Its initial appearance in English was about 1200, and it was used to mean to spy on. After that we had to wait about two centuries for “wait” to mean to stay or to delay doing something — that meaning shows up in The Canterbury Tales. 

Then it was back to waiting; it took another two centuries for “wait” to mean “serve as an attendant at table; to hand food and drink to persons at a meal.” Although the word “waiter” appeared as early as 1392, it took until the 1600s before it meant the person doing the serving. 

But then, of course, there’s the thing that waiters do. In the beginning it was “wait at the table” or “wait on the table”; that was in the late 1500s, when “wait at” showed up in 1568 and “wait on” was first used in 1575. 

After that? More waiting. The progression over the centuries has consistently been to continually shorten the phrase. From “wait at the table” to “wait at table” took nearly three centuries; Jane Austen used the shorter version in Pride and Prejudice in 1813. Then around the 1890s, “wait table” began to show up generally, although there is one novel, The Laird of Fife by “anonymous,” which in 1828 included “By the bye, didn’t you wait table there last Tuesday?”

If you’re paying particularly close attention you’ll have noticed that these expressions were originally singular rather than plural; back in the day you would “wait on table” rather than “wait on tables.” The plural versions don’t seem to have appeared until the late 1800s. This is possibly due to economics; personal servants were the first ones to have that role, and they would generally be responsible for only one table. It wasn’t really until restaurants began to appear that a single server might wait more than one table — other than at a big fancy dinner party, of course, but oddly enough precious few linguistic innovations have ever emerged from such settings. But they still might. We’ll just have to wait.