menu
/ˈmɛnjuː
/- The site also features a meal planner, which allows consumers to print not only recipes, but also menus and shopping lists.
- It says restaurant menus increasingly list details of food producers and suppliers.
- After being shown to our table we were handed the wine list and menus.
Synonyms
- There is a good restaurant at the South Sea Hotel serving a mixed menu including sea food.
- Homely restaurants serve inexpensive fixed menus known as comida corrida.
- Let's see more baked potatoes and lentil soup on school menus, fruit juices being promoted instead of branded fizzy drinks.
- A number of menus are available when you are inside the administrative interface, and some of these menus have submenus as well.
- Important operations are hidden in right-mouse-click pop-up menus and do not also appear on the main menus or toolbars.
Origin
Mid 19th century: from French, 'detailed list' (noun use of menu 'small, detailed'), from Latin minutus 'very small'.
When people first used menu in English they treated it as a foreign word, printing it in italic type, and perhaps pronouncing it in a ‘French’ way. The word means ‘detailed list’ in French, and is a use of menu ‘small, detailed’ from Latin minutus ‘small’, the source of minute, mince, minutiae (mid 18th century) ‘small, precise or trivial details’, the delicate dance the minuet (late 17th century), and diminish. Applied to a list of dishes available in a restaurant, it dates from the mid 19th century; by the 20th it was fully anglicized, and by the 1960s could also mean ‘a list of facilities or commands displayed on a computer screen’.