One Word for the Waiter and the Machine
A server serves — food in a restaurant, or data on a network. The root is the Latin for slave, which is also where service and servant come from.
A server is anything that serves: a person waiting tables, a machine answering requests, a player starting a rally. The Latin behind the whole family is *servus*, a slave — service, servant, servile and serf all descend from it, and so does the word for a computer that spends its life answering other computers.
- A restaurant worker. *Ask your server.*
- A networked computer. *The mail server is down.*
- In tennis — the player serving. *The server won the point.*
- A serving utensil. *A cake server.*
Word forms
| Form | Word | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Noun | server | A web server. |
| Plural | servers | Redundant servers. |
| Verb | serve | Serve the soup. |
| Noun | service | Customer service. |
| Related | servant | A civil servant. |
- Our server took the order quickly.American usage; British often says waiter.
- The server returned a 404.Computing.
- The server has two aces in a row.Tennis.
Client and server
- Server — waits for requests and answers them
- Client — makes the requests; your browser is one
- Host — the machine itself, whatever it is doing
- Hosting — renting server capacity from someone else
- Why the name — the machine's whole job is answering, so it serves
From *serve*, from Latin *servire*, to be a servant, from *servus*, a slave. The computing sense dates from the 1960s and became common with networks in the 1980s.
Is server a better word than waiter?
In American English it is the common gender-neutral term. British English still mostly uses waiter and waitress, or staff.
Why is a computer called a server?
Because it waits for requests from other machines and serves the answers. The name describes the role, not the hardware.