Other forms: services, serviced, servicing
Service is the work someone does for you rather than a thing you take home. The waiter who refills your glass without being asked, the mechanic who checks your brakes, the woman on the phone who sorts out your bill.
As a verb it belongs to machines: you get your car serviced every year, and the garage services the boiler at the same time. A service is also an organisation that runs something for the public — the bus service, the health service, the postal service. In a church, a service is the ceremony itself, an hour of hymns and readings. In tennis, your service is the shot that starts the point. Keep the pairs straight: customer service is how you are treated, a service charge is money added to the bill, and a lift that is out of service is broken.
1nounattentionThe work done for customers or the public by a person or business, and the manner in which it is done.~41%
“The food was good but the service was painfully slow.”
2nounprovisionAn organisation or system that supplies something to the public.~51%
“The bus service to the village runs twice a day.”
3verbserviceTo examine and repair a vehicle or machine at regular intervals so it keeps working.~2%
“The garage services the van every twelve thousand miles.”
4nounscheduledA scheduled check and repair of a vehicle or machine.~2%
“The car is booked in for its annual service on Thursday.”
5nounreligiousA religious ceremony held in a church or other place of worship.~2%
“The evening service lasted just under an hour.”
6nountennisIn tennis and similar games, the act of hitting the ball to begin a point.~2%
“She lost her service twice in the second set.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 20 sentences found in the wild and placed 20 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
service is work done for other people.
Service came through Middle English servise and Old French servise from Latin servitium, the condition of a servant, built on servus — servant, serf, slave. Behind servus sits a Proto-Indo-European word for a guardian, *ser-wo-s, from a root *ser- meaning to watch over or protect. So the oldest picture is not fetching and carrying but standing guard over something. It pushed out the older English word thegnung.
Middle English
servise
English, today
service
Built from
From Middle English servise. From Middle English servise, from Old English serfis, from Old French servise (French service), from the verb servir, from Latin servitium (compare Portuguese serviço, Italian servizio, Norman sèrvice, Spanish servicio), from servus (“servant; serf; slave”), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European ser-wo-s (“guardian”), possibly from ser- (“watch over, protect”). Displaced native Old English þeġnung.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA