Word.ws English Dictionary

dinner lady

dinner lady noun: a woman employed to serve food in a school or work canteen.

Noun

dinner lady (plural dinner ladies)

  1. (UK, informal) A woman employed to serve food in a school or work canteen.
    • Ten years to the month after Jamie Oliver began his school food revolution – with the help of a formidable dinner lady called Nora Sands at Kidbrooke school in south London – a small inner-city primary on the other side of the Thames is doing its best to give it a new lease of life.2015 April 4, Sally Weale, “The new dinner lady: 10 years on, can an Ottolenghi chef prove Jamie Oliver's revolution wasn't a flash in the pan?”, in The Guardian

Synonyms of dinner lady

Forms of dinner lady

pluraldinner ladies

Origin of dinner lady

Ellipsis of school dinner lady.

Words formed from dinner lady

Questions about dinner lady

What does dinner lady mean?
Dinner lady means a woman employed to serve food in a school or work canteen.
What part of speech is dinner lady?
Dinner lady is a noun.
What is the plural of dinner lady?
The plural of dinner lady is dinner ladies.

Words near dinner lady in the dictionary

  1. dinner jacket
  2. dinner jackets
  3. dinner knife
  4. dinner knives
  5. dinner ladies
  6. dinner lady
  7. dinner lady arm
  8. dinner lady arms
  9. dinner man
  10. dinner parties
  11. dinner party

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: dinner lady (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-dinner lady.wav.

Cite this entry: “dinner lady.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/dinner_lady. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.