This is one of those words I thought I knew, but it turns out I had only a partial view of. My wife and I were watching the making-of extra for I, Claudius when one of the actors talked about how food was brought to the dining table from “dumbwaiters.” From the context it didn’t seem possible that the word was used in the sense familiar to me (Wikipedia: “a small freight elevator or lift intended to carry food”), so I looked it up and discovered a quite different sense — to quote the OED (which has it as two words, dumb waiter; the entry was revised in 2023) “1. Chiefly British. A movable table, typically with revolving shelves, used for serving food and drink” (first citation from ?1730: “Two fine India japan dumb Waiters”). Then we get:
2. Originally North American. A movable platform or compartment inside a vertical shaft, used to deliver items between floors in a building, esp. food or empty plates between a kitchen and a dining area, and accessed through a hatch in a wall. Also occasionally: such a hatch itself.
1833 On the side and in the centre of the main stairway, the dumb waiters rise, by the aid of the steam-engine in the basement, to the tower.
G. M. Davison, Traveller’s Guide Middle & Northern States & Provinces Canada 109
So what Brits call a dumb waiter, we Yanks call a lazy Susan; is there an alternate UK word for the American sense? And are you familiar with both meanings, or does each side of the pond rest in blissful ignorance of the other side’s usage?
I’m a Brit and was unaware of the ‘movable table’ meaning of dumb waiter – that would be a lazy susan as far as I’m concerned.
The plot thickens! So maybe the US usage has achieved hegemony, as usual.
Much the same for me as for Andrew Szmelter. I think I had some vestigial awareness of what seems to be the older Brit usage, but it’s hard to know if I would have said so before this was all pointed out above.
Well, here are the last two OED cites for the original sense:
So it was in use within living memory.
And in Danish, a “stumtjener” is a coat stand. The dictionary at ordnet.dk notes that German also has the word (in the serving table sense). I also looked in the historical dictionary (publication date 1944, same site) which gives a different kind of serving table as definition (makes sense, the word was archaic even then), in addition to the coat stand one, and also a literal “dumb waiter”.
I only know stummer Diener in the “one particular kind of clothes stand” sense, encountered once. I did not know rotating tables existed till I went to China for a conference in 2006.
I’m taken with the “India japan” pileup.
Wiktionary has the food elevator for sense 1, lazy susan as sense 3 (obsolete), but for sense 2, also obsolete: “A table or set of trays on rollers used for serving food.”
And if you do an image search for “wheeled dumbwaiter” you’ll see results from auction sites that are neither lazy susans nor food elevators, just serving stands on casters.
I imagine at one point “dumbwaiters” were the whole class of mechanized serving devices.
Lars S.: And in Danish, a “stumtjener” is a coat stand.
David M.: I only know stummer Diener in the “one particular kind of clothes stand” sense
Adding Norwegian, the particular central-pole-and-radial-branches kind of clothes stand. It’s not a rare word either. It’s a word kids is amused by when they encounter it and then remember – much like the object itself.
I thought a lazy Susan was a large round rotatable tray set at the middle of a typically round table, when many dishes are shared among people sitting around the table, standard in Chinese restaurants.
That’s the meaning I know for it. Mom had one, mostly for Thanksgiving and Passover. It’s not the OED’s sense 1 for “dumb waiter”.
I was aware that there was another meaning to dumbwaiter, but I don’t think I ever knew specifically what it referred to. If I had had to guess, I would have hazarded that it referred to a serving trolley. In fact, when I first read that OED quote (“… movable table, typically with revolving shelves…”), I envisioned a trolley with a lazy Susan (or a tiered stack of lazy Susans, possibly rotating independently around a central pillar). I have certainly seen serving trolleys with lazy Susans on top at dim sum restaurants. (I wonder what the Cantonese term for the composite device is.)
Oh, and coming from the other direction, I thought to look up the terms Agatha Christie used in “The Third Floor Flat” for the shaft lifts used to send things up to the units. Someone more knowledgeable about 1920s English apartment buildings may be able to comment on the pragmatics.
The thing that we have in our (Canadian) kitchen which we call a “lazy Susan” is built in, under a counter, and we use it for storing pots and other kitchenware. It’s not movable, it’s not a table, and it’s not used for serving food. It does have rotating shelves though.
I think that I (USian) have the kind of storage thing Paul Clapham mentions (it has a door that looks like a cabinet door, goes from the floor to counter height, and contains a one-piece rotating thing with two shelves).
I’d call that a “lazy susan”, and I’d call the Chinese restaurant thing (a rotating disc on a table top) a “lazy susan”, too. I don’t think I’d call anything else a “lazy susan”.
It had never occurred to me that “dumbwaiter” could mean anything other than “a small freight elevator or lift intended to carry food”.
If you have a [free gratis] Internet Archive account you can see the OED-cited 1999 catalog, with caption and photograph of the Louis XVI mahogany dumb waiters, here. I guess they do just wait, if waiting is a separate activity from serving.
For me, a lazy susan stands in the centre of a dining table and is turned by the diners as they dine, which I have only seen one or twice in Chinese restaurants. Not trolleys or other multi-tray contraptions used by waitstaff, and not turntables in kitchens or cupboards.
For me, a dumb waiter is a small freight elevator connecting a kitchen to a dining area, which I may never have seen in real life. I suppose it could be considered a type of service lift, but the prototypical service lift is large enough for service personnel and perhaps larger machinery.
Never having heard of J Wainwright, I searched and found this less than enthusiastic review of Their Evil Ways:
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/a/john-wainwright-10/their-evil-ways/
It would appear that I haven’t missed a lot …
This is he:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wainwright_(author)
He may or may not* have been any great shakes as an author, but getting a law degree by studying in your spare time as a police constable (having left school at 15) argues for certain admirable qualities.
* Unlike the Kirkus reviewer, Georges Simenon (no less) seems to have thought he was worth praising. Film adaptations, too.
I (perhaps wrongly) think of a dumbwaiter as a buttonless elevator. It has only two stops, upstairs and downstairs, and once you close its door at one stop it goes to the other one.
In Heinrich Böll’s Doktor Murkes gesammeltes Schweigen (which I read in English, as Murke’s Collected Silences, and is one of my all-time favorite short stories), I was introduced to what he calls a Paternoster, an elevator arranged like a rosary, with a closed chain of cabs doing a circular route and stopping at every floor, with no controls.
A different arrangement exists in modern Israeli apartment buildings catering to Haredis: there it’s just an ordinary elevator which can be configured to go up and down and stop at every floor on the Sabbath, so as not to require operating a switch.
to me:
a dumbwaiter is the OED’s sense 2 (i lived for a few years in an building with a defunct dumbwaiter whose doors still opened; we built shelves into the shaft and used it as a pantry). i think i’ve encountered the serving cart sense enough to parse it in context without too much confusion, but it definitely registers as british usage.
a lazy susan is the rotating table-top device. i don’t have a set term for a cabinet with rotating shelves, but i’d call it something like a “lazy susan cabinet” and expect to be understood.
I should probably say that some friends of mine have a “lazy Susan” for their pots and pans. Never knew what to call it.
I (UK) was vaguely aware of both senses; an item of furniture standing near the table from which diners can serve themselves (fulfilling the function of a waiter, but inanimate), and as an extension of that idea, the cabinet moving between floors.
Mr Jaggers uses a dumb waiter in Great Expectations. I found some information here: https://dickens.stanford.edu/dickens/archive/great/great_issue8gloss.html
(This is my first comment here but I’ve been a regular reader for a while.)
I’m with Y and many others as thinking of “lazy Susan” as not really the same as the OED sense 1 for “dumbwaiter,” but more sense 1 here: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lazy_Susan. Note that that link has a sense 2 which matches a different object discussed above. I don’t have a word for “lazy-Susan-mounted-on-rolling-table”* if that’s what the OED’s sense 1 is, probably not least because I can’t say I’m familiar with the object.
I have a vague and perhaps unreliable memory from childhood of supposing speculatively that the same underlying “Susan” was somehow associated both with the lazy Susan at my grandparents’ house and the wildflowers my parents told me were called black-eyed Susans. I may have had a pre-scientific sense of etymology at the time …
*Or maybe “rolling-table-equipped-with-multiple-lazy-Susans”?
Thanks, Pritam! Here’s a relevant snippet from the link:
Click through for the rest.
I’m with Y and many others as thinking of “lazy Susan” as not really the same as the OED sense 1 for “dumbwaiter,” but more sense 1 here
On reflection, I think I agree.
@J.W.B.: I think the connection was that “Susan” was a low-class name, suitable for the ingenue, beloved of a common sailor, of the once-famous lyric “Black-Eyed Susan” by John Gay and the once-famous melodrama Black-Eyed Susan by Douglas Jerrold, and for the maid who serves dishes. (Cf. “Sukey, take the kettle off.”)
I believe I first learned the term from Harold Pinter, who was not particularly American.
Oh no, it does not stop. It has no doors and keeps going at a constant speed, slow enough that you can hop on & off absent special circumstances.
rozele: a lazy susan is the rotating table-top device. i don’t have a set term for a cabinet with rotating shelves, but i’d call it something like a “lazy susan cabinet” and expect to be understood.
Lars S.: I should probably say that some friends of mine have a “lazy Susan” for their pots and pans. Never knew what to call it.
We do have such a cabinet under our kitchen countertop as part of our (IKEA 2001) kitchen arrangement, right next to the stove. IKES call it a benkehjørneskap med karusell “counter corner cupboard with carousel”.
I object to Jerry F.’s insinuations re “low-class” on behalf of my terrifyingly-respectable Great-Great-Aunt Susan (1877-1966).
I agree completely with J.W.B.’s objection (though I think we all want to hear more about the terrifying aspect). An ngram search shows that “Susan” was a perfectly suitable name for the aristocracy. However, it was clearly also a perfectly suitable name for servants.
Whan Adam dalf and Eve span
Who was thanne a gentelman?
(That’s what I always say. I gather that I myself would have been called Susan if I had had fewer Y chromosomes. But I am, of course, a natural aristocrat.)
Dumb waiters in the lift sense aren’t, or weren’t, just for food. In my grandmother’s NYC apartment c 1960, once a day at a more or less fixed time the superintendent would buzz to say he was sending up the dumbwaiter; my grandmother would place the day’s trash in it and buzz for it to be taken away.
I imagine that the dumb waiter shaft in which Whittaker Chambers hid some of the documents that Alger Hiss had passed to him was similar. In his sister-in-law’s apartment.
There are also silent butlers and sleeping policemen. The former also has two distinct meanings.
two distinct meanings
A slèeping pártner is (generally) distinct from a sléeping pàrtner.
Similarly, I suppose that a sléeping polìceman might be an official charged with enforcing the sleeping laws.
@David E.: that’s the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dream_Police_(song). No accent marks needed.
@DM: Yikes! And they are still in use?
I remember having to use a Paternoster in the 1990s. It was a somewhat frightening experience.
Yes, and I think I had to use one more recently. There are probably still a few out there; the best place to look are probably 50-to-60-year-old university buildings.
A paternoster can also be a storage or archive system on the same principle. I have met a couple of them in my life as a structural engineer. Heavy bastards.
The no.wp article points out that a common ski lift is a paternoster system as well.
Paternoster is of course a misnomer; a rosary has ten avemarias for every one paternoster. OTOH few Americans would step into a Hail Mary Elevator.
A similar concept is the man engine, Norw. fa(h)rkunst < Ger. I’ve tried it, and it’s pretty neat.
I’ve also seen elevators with a Sabbath mode — that is, six days out of seven (presumably excepting major Jewish holidays), they operate normally — in (US) hospitals that serve Orthodox Jews.
WikiP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shabbat_elevator
Hm. What’s the problem with them?
(This opinion is disputed, of course)
WikiP Paternoster_lift:
Yeesh!
The WikiP page also has a list of places that still have a paternoster lift. I sincerely hope that no Hatters experience a paternoster injury in an effort to satisfy their curiosity.
I knew we had them in the Danish Parliament!
The WikiP page also has a list of places that still have a paternoster lift.
I see my Alma mater (Essex University library building) still appears, but “currently out of service”. Fits @DM’s characterisation.
Yes, they were hazardous to use, especially when carrying heavy books. Undergrads are disposable/ it’s natural selection.
Undergrads are disposable/ it’s natural selection
It was probably the phasing out of paternosters (and the associated culling of less-viable undergraduates) that led to the fateful decision to replace proper state funding of students with the current ghastly loan system.
The remedy is clear. And it would surely pay for itself.
some Haredi rabbis, led by Rabbi Yosef Shalom Elyashiv, published a religious injunction forbidding the use of Shabbat elevators.
Hence in some Haredi neighborhoods buildings are limited to four stories high.
The remedy is clear. And it would surely pay for itself.
While on the subject of modern technology, the speed of university paternosters could be finely adjusted to correct for fluctuating rates of natural student attrition.
What does one call the robotic arrays of trays that move around and help clear tables and also serve in some cafeteria-like venues that don’t have waiters assigned to every table? Smart waiters? Drone waiters? Busbots? Helicopter Susans? I’ve seen them park themselves by tables that need clearing, and also deliver orders to tables in retirement communities (at least in Japan).
In the last year, I’ve seen two British television programs from the 1960s or 1970s that featured paternoster lifts. One was the episode “Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darling,” of The Prisoner, but I don’t remember what the other was. The elevator that operates without any seeming human control was very thematic of The Prisoner, even though that scene takes places at an ordinary London location. Seeing it was suitably eerie. (I had seen the episode before, of course, but not in decades. It’s one of the weak filler episodes, and Patrick McGoohan barely appears. I would normally skip it, but I was watching the whole series with one of my kids.)
Adding Norwegian, the particular central-pole-and-radial-branches kind of clothes stand.
That’s exactly the type I know as Stummer Diener
We also have the rotating shelf discussed in our kitchen. It’s in a corner cupboard and allows to make full use of that corner space. We don’t have any specific name for it.
Same.
The Jewish Museum in New York used to close on the Sabbath. They are now open, not charging admission as they do the rest of the week, and with one of the two elevators (if I recall correctly) operating as a Sabbath elevator. Handling money and pressing a button to operate an electrical switch (which counts as kindling fire) are two of the activities that qualify as work forbidden on the Sabbath.
Sometimes the exact nomenclature matters — Trond wrote “paternoster archive” on the other thread, in response to Ryan, and searching on [ paternoster archive ] brings up paternoster lifts.
But [ paternoster storage ] brings up more pretty much what Ryan was trying to describe. There’s many such system. I wanted to see videos of the thing, so some video results are:
Kasten Paternoster – vertical storage machine
Dexion Paternoster Vertical Carousel
Almacenaje Vertical: Rotativo – Paternoster
Megamat Paternoster mit Mega-Zuladung bei Selektor Lagerlogistik
Kardex Megamat 115⧸120⧸125 for Secure File Storage
Just as the first few. They’re all adverts, unsurprisingly.
@DE Similarly, I suppose that a sléeping polìceman might be an official charged with enforcing the sleeping laws.
In the United Kingdom and a good number of other countries, a sleeping policeman is a traffic-calming device ()https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_bump).
Wikipedia offers many equivalent terms in languages other than English as well as a number of additional English ones. See entries such as silent cop, speed hump, and speed bump. In Israeli Hebrew it is called a פס האטה.
What is the Welsh term? No true Welshman can be without it.
Adjacent to speed bumps are Botts’ dots, a.k.a. turtles.
@DE Similarly, I suppose that a sléeping polìceman might be an official charged with enforcing the sleeping laws.
In the United Kingdom and a good number of other countries, a sleeping policeman is a traffic-calming device
I assume DE knows that. But aren’t these devices pronounced sleeping políceman, with stress on the second word? I’m genuinely interested, because I have encountered that word only in writing, and I’ve found over the years (including on this blog) that my intuitions wrt English pronunciation are wrong.
Both LPD and CEPD put the main accent on policeman.
But aren’t these devices pronounced sleeping políceman, with stress on the second word?
Certainly, but DE’s point was that if there were such a thing as an official charged with enforcing the sleeping laws (if there were such laws), the stress would probably be on the “sleeping” (cf. “traffic cop”).
Owlmirror: Sometimes the exact nomenclature matters — Trond wrote “paternoster archive” on the other thread, in response to Ryan, and searching on [ paternoster archive ] brings up paternoster lifts.
But [ paternoster storage ] brings up more pretty much what Ryan was trying to describe.
I first (here in this thread) wrote “a storage or archive system on the same principle”. When Ryan described a paternoster device used to store and access an organized system of election documents, it seemed sensible to simplify or specify to “paternoster archive”, even if the storage system may be used also for non-archive purposes. I’m not aware of an established term beyond “paternoster” and whatever different vendors might choose for their products.
Certainly, but DE’s point was that if there were such a thing as an official charged with enforcing the sleeping laws (if there were such laws), the stress would probably be on the “sleeping” (cf. “traffic cop”).
I know, and I wanted to point that out to M., who seems to have misunderstood DE here, but then I got caught up in the thought that maybe I am getting things wrong and sleeping policemen maybe are stressed on the first word…
They’re stressed, but mainly by the fear that a higher-up will catch them sleeping on the job.
What is the Welsh term?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twmpath
We are a musical people.
There are also rotating jewelry display cases like this one. They, or at least one brand of them are “Berg Motion Cases.”