Pronounced: MAG-pie
Notes: I knew some of the meanings, but not all of them
Yesterday’s word
The word trattoria means “a restaurant; specifically a usually small Italian restaurant”
First usage
Our word came into English in the mid-1800s
Background / Comments
In thinking about our word, I don’t think I have run across it – the reason it seemed familiar is that in the Nero Wolfe book Some Buried Caesar, there is a chain of restaurants called “prattorias”, and this is why I thought our word was familiar. In Italian, trattore is the word for an innkeeper or restaurant owner. That word comes from the Old French verb traitier (to treat); it comes from the Latin word tractare (to drag about; handle; deal with). In addition to our word, there are other words that refer to a special eatery: brasserie (from French in the mid-1800s), bistro (from French in the 1920s), and taqueria (from Mexican Spanish in the 1980s).
Richard's Vocabulary Word-of-the-Day 