/ˈkeɪtər/
[verb] To provide food and drinks for a group of people at an event, or more generally, to give people what they need or want.
'Cater' was once a person, not an action — a buyer of food whose job title quietly became a verb.
The story of 'cater' begins not as a verb but as a noun, and not as a common word but as a job title. In the 14th and 15th centuries, large households employed a professional called an 'acatour' or 'cateur' — a person responsible for going to market and purchasing provisions. This word came directly from the Anglo-Norman 'acatour', meaning a buyer, which itself descended from the Old French 'acater', meaning to buy or to purchase. That Old French verb traced back further still to the Vulgar Latin 'accaptare', a compound of 'ad' (meaning towards) and 'captare' (meaning to seize or catch), which came from the classical Latin 'capere', to take or seize. So at its ancient heart, catering was about the act of seizing goods from the market.
By the 16th century, the English language had performed one of its favourite tricks: it dropped the first syllable of 'acatour' and turned the remainder into the shortened form 'cater'. This clipping was common in English, much like how 'alone' was once 'all one' or how 'apron' lost its initial 'n'. The shortened noun 'cater' referred to the person who bought food — what we might today call a purchasing agent or a buyer. You can still see this older form preserved in the word 'caterer', which is simply 'cater' with the agent suffix '-er' added, making it, etymologically speaking, a buyer-er — someone who buys.
The transformation from noun to verb happened gradually during the late 16th century. Shakespeare himself used 'cater' as a verb in 'As You Like It' (around 1599), when a character speaks of catering for others. This shift was natural: as households began hiring people specifically to manage and supply food for banquets and feasts, the act of doing what the cater did became 'to cater'. The word had fully made the leap from a job description to an action that anyone could perform. Language often works this way — a person's role becomes a verb when society finds it useful to name that activity directly.
Over the following centuries, the meaning of 'cater' expanded well beyond the kitchen and the marketplace. By the 17th and 18th centuries, writers were using it figuratively to mean supplying any kind of need or desire — one could cater to someone's curiosity, vanity, or ambitions. This broader sense reflects the word's growing abstraction: instead of a man carrying baskets from a market stall, 'cater' came to describe any act of providing what someone wants or requires. Today, we speak of television programmes that 'cater to' certain audiences, or shops that 'cater for' specific tastes, and the culinary origins of the word feel entirely distant.
The Latin root 'capere' — that original verb meaning to seize or take — turns out to be one of the most productive roots in the English language, though its connection to 'cater' is rarely recognised. Through different routes of transmission, it also gave us: Latin 'capere' → Old French 'chasser' → English 'chase'; Latin 'capere' → Latin 'captivus' → Old French 'captif' → English 'captive'; and Latin 'capere' → Latin 'capax' → English 'capable'. The idea of grasping or seizing runs quietly through all of them. In 'cater', though, the seizing is gentle and domestic — a trip to the market, a plate of food, a guest made comfortable. From ancient Roman verb to English dinner party, 'cater' has travelled a long and surprisingly elegant road.