Other forms: servers
A server is a powerful always-on computer that websites, games and services run on. The server is down, a game server, upload it to the server.
The word covers both the machine and the software running on it. Everyday phrases include server error, server room, and the client-server model, which is the basic shape of the internet: your device asks, the server answers. In American English a server is also a person waiting tables in a restaurant — the gender-neutral replacement for waiter and waitress. Note serve, which does the work in both senses.
1nounserverAn always-on computer that websites and services run on.
“The server went down twice on the day of the launch.”
2nounwaitsSomebody who waits tables in a restaurant.
“Our server had four tables and remembered every order.”
server is something that serves.
Server is simply serve plus -er, the plainest agent noun. The computing sense arrived in the 1960s and the restaurant sense in the 1980s, both from the same idea of somebody bringing what you asked for.
Middle English
servere
English, today
server
From Middle English servere, equivalent to serve + -er.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA