Other forms: canteens
The canteen is the room at school or at work where everybody eats. Trays, a queue, a hot counter, and three tables of people who always sit in the same seats. You go down to the canteen at one.
This is the British word; Americans say cafeteria for the same room. In a barracks or on a big site the canteen also sells the small things people run out of, so it shades into a shop. Then there are two other canteens that have nothing to do with a room. A soldier's or a walker's canteen is a flat bottle on a strap, and a canteen of cutlery is a fitted wooden box of knives and forks, the sort of thing people are given as a wedding present.
1nouncanteenThe dining room in a school, office, factory or barracks.~76%
“We queue in the canteen from twelve.”
synonyms: cafeteria, dining hall, mess
2nouncontainerA flat bottle for water, carried on a strap by a soldier or a walker.~22%
“He filled his canteen at the stream.”
synonyms: flask, water bottle
3nounfittedA fitted box holding a full set of knives, forks and spoons.~2%
“They were given a canteen of cutlery for the wedding.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 144 sentences found in the wild and placed 105 of them on a sense (39 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Also accepted in games: cafeteria
can-TEEN → a TIN
A long table laid with nothing but tin — tin cups, tin plates, tin spoons. You hold yours out and the food lands on it with a bang.
hooks ontotin
The word came through French cantine from Italian cantina. English later helped itself to the Italian word as well, unchanged — so canteen and cantina are one word borrowed twice, one of them by way of Paris.
Italian
cantina
French
cantine
English, today
canteen
Borrowed from French cantine, itself borrowed from Italian cantina. a doublet of cantina.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA