Restorative Restaurants

The ‘Saluhall’ in Stockholm

‘Restaurant’ is such a ubiquitous word. Nearly every European language has a version that is similar in structure.

I took out my etymology dictionaries (my pile is growing: French, Swedish, German) to find its root. It turns out it springs from a Latin root (unsurprisingly) ultimately meaning ‘to restore’.

The outliers are the Celtic languages … now, if I could just get my hands on a Welsh etymology dictionary …

You can download (for free) a summary of the etymology, translations of the word in different Indo-European languages, and a list of related words to support vocabulary expansion.