covers

UK/ˈkʌvəz/US/ˈkʌvɚz/

nounC12 meanings Common in everyday speech and writing · #2,566 of 15,258leans written

In a restaurant, covers means the number of guests served in a sitting. Forty covers, do two hundred covers a night, a hundred covers on a Saturday.

It is the industry's basic measure of trade, and it counts diners rather than tables or bills. A cover charge is a separate fee some restaurants add per head. Elsewhere, the covers are the blankets on a bed, and in music a cover is a new recording of somebody else's song. Note cover as a verb, which does an enormous number of jobs in English.

Definitions of covers

1nouncoversThe number of guests a restaurant serves in a sitting.C1
“They do about two hundred covers on a Saturday.”
2nounblanketsThe blankets on a bed.B1
“He pulled the covers over his head at about four in the morning.”

Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.

Also practised as

nounThe blankets on a bed.

Practised in Restaurant & Cafe

Practise this word

covers in the wild

The second covers the time from the Trojan War to the death of Alexander the Great.
Diodorus Siculus
The third covers the period to about 60 BC.
Diodorus Siculus
The dust jacket protects the book covers from damage.
Dust jacket
Some of the envelopes were sold at high prices by West German stamp dealer Hermann Sieger, and are known as "Sieger covers".
Apollo 15 postal covers incident
Scott, Worden, and Irwin all agreed to take payments for carrying the covers.
Apollo 15 postal covers incident

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

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