café au lait

Noun

café au lait (countable and uncountable, plural café au laits or cafés au lait)

1. A mixture of coffee and hot milk.
   • It was like using a language I'd once known but had nearly forgotten, a language having to do with customs that had long before passed out of the world: café au lait at an outdoor table, with a brioche, absinthe in a tall glass, or shrimp in a cornucopia of newspaper; things I'd once read about but...1985, Margaret Atwood, “Soul Scrolls”, in The Handmaid’s Tale, Toronto, Ont.: McClelland and Stewart, →ISBN, page 164
2. Coffee and hot milk served in separate jugs as a breakfast drink.
   • By my side was the empty bowl in which the concierge had brought me my café au lait and the fragment of croissant which I had not had appetite enough to eat. I heard the concierge in the next room emptying my bath.1919, W[illiam] Somerset Maugham, chapter XXXIV, in The Moon and Sixpence, [New York, N.Y.]: Grosset & Dunlap Publishers […], →OCLC, page 175
3. A light coffee colour.
   • Seen all of a piece like this, in a picture that fits snugly into the lens of any camera, Kersey is a peaceful, multi-coloured Toytown of a village, whose red-tiled roofs are subdued by just the right amount of weathering and lichen, and whose overhanging gables thrust forward in a quiet brilliance...1980, AA Book of British Villages, Drive Publications Ltd, page 240