chef
/ʃɛf/noun
Professional cook, especially head of a kitchen
From Latin caput (head).
Lineage
The story
Before chef meant someone coaxing a perfect soufflé from an oven, French used chef for a head, leader, or ruler—the person literally at the top. In the nineteenth-century kitchen, chef de cuisine meant “head of the kitchen,” and English shortened the title to chef; the first English record in this sense dates to 1842. The family tree is crowded: Latin caput “head” also gave us captain and chieftain, while chief is an especially close English cousin. Wait, even capo belongs in the same gallery, carrying the old idea of a head or leader into Italian and musical vocabulary. So when a restaurant calls someone its chef, it is quietly preserving an ancient hierarchy: the kitchen’s “head” is still in charge.
Modern usage
In some slang, “chef someone up” means to stab them; “Chef” also refers to the South Park character played by Isaac Hayes.
- Heard in
- UK street slang · South Park · television
- See
- South Park character Chef, voiced by Isaac Hayes