Word.ws English Dictionary

dabbawala

dabbawala is the alternative spelling of dabbawalla.

Meaning of dabbawalla

Noun

dabbawalla (plural dabbawallas)

  1. (India) A deliveryperson in Mumbai, India who collects freshly cooked food in lunchboxes from workers' residences (mostly in the suburbs), delivers it to their respective workplaces, and returns the empty containers.
    • “There is a service called FedEx that is similar to ours — but they don’t deliver lunch,” said one dabbawalla, Dhondu Kondaji Chowdhury.2007 May 29, Saritha Rai, “In India, Grandma Cooks, They Deliver”, in New York Times

Forms of dabbawala

pluraldabbawalas

Questions about dabbawala

What is dabbawala the alternative spelling of?
Dabbawala is the alternative spelling of dabbawalla.

Words near dabbawala in the dictionary

  1. dabbaba
  2. dabbabas
  3. dabbah
  4. dabbahs
  5. dabbas
  6. dabbawala
  7. dabbawalas
  8. dabbawalla
  9. dabbawallah
  10. dabbawallahs
  11. dabbawallas

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: dabbawala (page history and authors); dabbawalla (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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