Other forms: served, serving, serves
To serve is to bring food and drink to people. Serve dinner, serve the customers, serve with rice. It is the everyday restaurant word and it is regular.
It reaches a long way from there. Serve a customer in a shop, serve in the army, serve a sentence in prison, serve on a committee, serve a purpose. In tennis, to serve is to start the point, and the serve is the shot. Note the useful phrase it serves him right, meaning he deserved what happened, and serve up, which means to present something, often with a note of disappointment about what is being presented.
1verbserveTo bring food or drink to people.
“Dinner is served at seven.”
synonyms: dish up, wait on
2verbhelpTo help customers in a shop.
“Nobody served us for ten minutes.”
3verbworkTo work for an organisation or spend time in a role.
“He served twenty years in the navy.”
4verbusefulTo be useful for a purpose.
“The box served as a table for a month.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
serve is a way of providing.
Latin servire meant to be a slave, from servus, a slave — the same root as servant, service and, at a distance, sergeant. Every modern sense has climbed a long way from that, but the idea of doing something for somebody else is in all of them.
Proto-Indo-European
*ser- (guard)
Latin
serviō — be a slave; serve
Old French
servir
Middle English
serven
English, today
serve
Built from
From Middle English serven, from Old French servir, from Latin serviō (“be a slave; serve”), from Latin servus (“slave; servant”), which perhaps derives from ett - (compare ett - proper names 𐌔𐌄𐌓𐌅𐌉, 𐌔𐌄𐌓𐌅𐌄), or from Proto-Indo-European ser- (“watch over, protect”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA