Other forms: banquets, banqueting
A banquet is a huge formal dinner. Long tables, a seating plan with your name on a card, four courses and speeches in the gaps between them — a wedding reception in a hotel ballroom, or a dinner at the town hall with the mayor at the top table.
A banquet carries scale and ceremony: a toast, someone tapping a glass with a fork, a menu printed for the occasion. A big meal among friends is a feast or a spread, not a banquet. The room hotels keep for it is the banqueting hall. A state banquet is the top of the range, with heads of state, gold plates and a menu in two languages. Loosely, any table groaning with food gets called a banquet: after a fortnight of tinned soup, cheese on toast can feel like one.
1nounbanquetA large formal meal for many guests, held to mark an occasion and usually including speeches.
“Three hundred guests sat down to the banquet at eight.”
2nounspreadA spread of food far larger or richer than usual.
“After a week of sandwiches at his desk, a hot pie felt like a banquet.”
3verbholdTo hold a banquet, or to entertain someone at one.
“The delegates were banqueted for three nights running.”
banquet is a formal meal.
Also accepted in games: feast
Banquet came through Middle French from Italian banchetto, which means a little bench — from banco, bench, itself from Germanic bankiz. It started life as the small snack you ate perched on a bench between meals, and grew into the grandest dinner the language has.
Italian
banchetto
Middle French
banquet
Middle English
banket
English, today
banquet
Built from
From Middle English banket, from Middle French banquet, from Italian banchetto. From Middle English banket, from Middle French banquet, from Italian banchetto (“light repast between meals, snack eaten on a small bench”) literally “a small bench”, from banco (“bench”), from lng bank, panch (“bench”), from Proto-Germanic bankiz (“bench”). Akin to Old High German bank, banch (“bench”), Old English benċ (“bench”). More at bank, bench. The unetymological /w/ resulted from spelling-pronunciation.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA