dining-room

See also: dining room and diningroom

English

Noun

dining-room (plural dining-rooms)

1. Alternative spelling of dining room
   • 1716, Alexander Pope, A Further Account of the Most Deplorable Condition of Mr. Edmund Curll, Bookseller:

     All theſe gentlemen appeared at the hour appointed in Mr. Curlls dining-room, two excepted ; one of whom was the gentleman in the cockloft, his landlady being out of the way, and the gradus ad parnaſſum taken down; the other happened to be too cloſely watched by the bailiffs.

   • 1731 (date written, published 1745), Jonathan Swift, “Directions to Servants”, in Thomas Sheridan, John Nichols, editors, The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, […], new edition, volume XVI, London: […] J[oseph] Johnson, […], published 1801, →OCLC:

     let her [the cook] follow him softly with a ladle full, and 'dribble it all the way up stairs to the dining-room

   • 1751, [Tobias] Smollett, “The memoirs of a lady of quality”, in The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle […], volume III, London: Harrison and Co., […], →OCLC, page 170:

     On the ſecond day of my impriſonment, I was viſited by the duke of L⁠—⁠—, a friend of my lord, who found me ſitting upon a trunk, in a poor little dining-room filled with lumber, and lighted with two bits of tallow-candle, which had been left over night.

   • 1813 January 27, [Jane Austen], Pride and Prejudice: […], volume (please specify |volume=I to III), London: […] [George Sidney] for T[homas] Egerton, […], →OCLC:

     […] down they ran into the dining-room, which fronted the lane, in quest of this wonder; it was two ladies stopping in a low phaeton at the garden gate.

   • 1828, JT Smith, Nollekens and His Times, Century Hutchinson, published 1986, page 69:

     [H]e built a dining-room close to his kitchen, with a buttery-hatch opening into it, so that he and his friends might enjoy beef-steaks, hot and hot, upon the same plan as the members of the Beef-steak Club are supplied at their room in the Lyceum.

   • 1842, Edward Hungerford, D. Elers Napier, Excursions along the shores of the Mediterranean, page 308:

     After visiting the soko we returned to Mr. Benoliel's hotel, to adonize for the dinner we were to partake of at Mr. Hay's, to whose house we repaired about five, found a small party assembled in his very snug dining-room, and sat down to a capital dinner, and very good wine of our host's own growth and manufacture, and to which he had given the classical name of Ampelusian, the old nomenclature bestowed on this part of the country by the Greeks, in consequence of the then excellence of its wines.

   • 1848, Anne Brontë, chapter 24, in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall‎^[1]:

     He made a long stay in the dining-room after dinner, and, I fear, took an unusual quantity of wine, but not enough to loosen his tongue: for when he came in and found me quietly occupied with my book, too busy to lift my head on his entrance, he merely murmured an expression of suppressed disapprobation […]

   • 1857, Anthony Trollope, chapter 26, in Barchester Towers‎^[2], volume 2, Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1859, page 335:

     As Mr. Arabin had already moved out of the parsonage of St. Ewold’s, that scheme of elongating the dining-room was of course abandoned;

   • 1864 August – 1866 January, [Elizabeth] Gaskell, chapter 44, in Wives and Daughters. An Every-day Story. […], volume (please specify |volume=I or II), London: Smith, Elder and Co., […], published 1866, →OCLC:

     “For with an invalid so much depends on tranquillity. In the drawing-room, for instance, she might constantly be disturbed by callers; and the dining-room is so—so what shall I call it? so dinnery,—the smell of meals never seems to leave it; it would have been different if dear papa had allowed me to throw out that window—”

   • 1873, Edgar Fawcett, chapter XV, in Purple and Fine Linen. A Novel., New York, N.Y.: G. W. Carleton & Co., […]; London: S[ampson] Low, Son & Co., page 173:

     How, then, can I account for his serene angerless conduct during dinner? Henry’s presence in the dining-room might have prevented him from keeping frownful silence, but he would not have made that a reason for cheerful spirits.

   • 1878 November, Henry Lee, “Singing Mice”, in Popular Science Monthly, volume 14, page 102:

     My friend explained to me that every evening two little mice came out from behind the skirting-board in his dining-room, and sang for their supper of cheese, biscuit, and other muscine delicacies, which he took care to place on the carpet for them always at the same hour.

   • 1884, Hiram Bigelow, Family Companion, letter, quoted in Dictionary of Americanisms, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, page 198:

     I went into the dining-room, and sot down afore a plate that had my name writ on a card onto it; and I did walk into the beef and 'taters and things about east.

   • 1885 December 11 – 1886 February 11, William Penn Ryman, quoting John R. Barton, “The Early Settlement of Dallas Township, Pa.”, in Horace Edwin Hayden, editor, Proceedings and Collections of the Wyoming Historical and Geological Society, volume VI, Wilkes-Barré, Pa.: […] [E. B. Yordy Co.] for the [Wyoming Historical and Geological] Society, published 1901, →OCLC, pages 212–214:

     I can count many families living in log houses with a ladder only for a stairway to the loft, where one or more beds and sometimes house plunder and grain were kept; while the room below—kitchen, dining-room and parlor—where the wool was carded into rolls, spun and sometimes woven into cloth, prepared for the puller, to be made into good warm winter goods.

   • 1886 June 24, Ellen Tucker Emerson, edited by Edith E. W. Gregg, The Letters of Ellen Tucker Emerson, volume two, The Kent State University Press, published 1982, →ISBN, page 566:

     Once or twice indeed she has asked for the shears and gone out alone as in old times returning with a load of roses, and has then demanded vases and arranged them at the pier-table in the dining-room, and carried the various vasesful to their places without any thought of weakness or difficulty.

   • 1888, “The Jackdaw”, in W[illiam] B[utler] Yeats, editor, Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (The Camelot Series), London: Walter Scott, […]; New York, N.Y.: Thomas Whittaker; Toronto, Ont.: W. J. Gage & Co., →OCLC, page 304:

     Tom Moor was fond of gaming, and often lost large sums of money; finding his business neglected in his absence, he had a small hazard table set up in one corner of his dining-room, and invited a party of his friends to play at it.

   • 1894, E[dith Anna] Œ[none] Somerville, Martin Ross [pseudonym; Violet Florence Martin], chapter IV, in The Real Charlotte […], volume I, London: Ward and Downey […], →OCLC, page 47:

     Then she went into the house, and, sitting down at the davenport in the dining-room, got out a sheet of her best notepaper, and wrote a note to Pamela Dysart in her strong, commercially clear hand.

   • 1897 December (indicated as 1898), Winston Churchill, chapter VIII, in The Celebrity: An Episode, New York, N.Y.: The Macmillan Company; London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd., →OCLC:

     The humor of my proposition appealed more strongly to Miss Trevor than I had looked for, and from that time forward she became her old self again; […] . Our table in the dining-room became again the abode of scintillating wit and caustic repartee, Farrar bracing up to his old standard, and the demand for seats in the vicinity rose to an animated competition.

   • 1903, The Pall Mall Magazine, volume 30, page 304:

     He lit a fire in the dining-room, and the chimney was damp and smoked abominably, so that when he had fed full on tinned meats he was fain to let the fire go out and to sit in his fur-lined overcoat by the becindered grate, now fast growing cold, and smoke pipe after pipe of gloomy reflection.

   • 1907, Barbara Baynton, edited by Sally Krimmer and Alan Lawson, Human Toll (Portable Australian Authors: Barbara Baynton), St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, published 1980, page 175:

     She found her in the dining-room with Ann Foster, the little dressmaker, who was endeavouring to scissors through the right side of her underlip with her teeth as proof that the compiling of a list of requisites was no tax to her.

   • 1909, Eugénie Paul Jefferson, Intimate Recollections of Joseph Jefferson‎^[3], Dodd, Mead & Company, page 41:

     Upon entering the dining-room, the painting faced one from the opposite end of the room, receiving light from a large landscape window on the left, and an overlight of electricity by night, the room being otherwise in darkness.

   • 1909, Rudyard Kipling, “A Wayside Comedy”, in Under the Deodars (The Works of Rudyard Kipling), Edinburgh de Luxe edition, Boston, Mass., London: The Edinburgh Society, →OCLC, page 64:

     As she passed through the dining-room she heard, behind the purdah that cloaked the drawing-room door, her husband's voice, […]

   • 1912, Albert Bigelow Paine, Mark Twain A Biography‎^[4]:

     I supposed he would want to go down with as little ostentation as possible, so took him by the elevator which enters the dining-room without passing through the long corridor known as "Peacock Alley", because of its being a favorite place for handsomely dressed fashionables of the national capital.

   • 1913, Theodore Dreiser, A Traveler at Forty:

     […] arraying her maid gorgeously, put all the jewels on her and sent her into the casino or the ballroom or the dining-room — wherever it was — and she herself followed, in — let us hope — plain, jewelless black silk, with her lovely flesh showing voluptuously against it.

   • 1916, Fannie Hurst, Every Soul Hath Its Song‎^[5]:

     On the ground floor of a dim house in a dim street, which by the contrivance of its occupants had been converted from its original role of dark and sinister dining-room to wareroom for a dozen or more perambulators on high, rubber-tired wheels, Alphonse Michelson and Gertie Dobriner stood in conference with a dark-wrappered figure, her blue-checked apron wound muff fashion about her hands.

   • 1921, Frederick O'Brien, Mystic Isles of the South Seas.‎^[6]:

     A little while later, when I came to the dining-room for the first breakfast, I met Lovaina in a blue-figured aahu of muslin and lace, a close-fitting, sweeping nightgown, the single garment that Tahitians wear all day and take off at night, a tunic, or Mother Hubbard, which reveals their figures without disguise, unstayed, unpetticoated.

   • 1922, Emily Post, Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics, and at Home, Chapter 14: Formal Dinners, [7]

     Enchanting dining-rooms and tables have been achieved with an outlay amounting to comparatively nothing. ¶ There is a dining-room in a certain small New York house that is quite as inviting as it is lacking in expensiveness.

   • 1924, Ford Madox Ford, Some Do Not... (Parade's End), Penguin, published 2012, page 116:

     The dining-room had windows on each side and a beam across; the dining silver had been picked up at sales, the tumblers were old cut glass; on each side of the ingle was a grandfather's chair.

   • 1931, William Faulkner, Sanctuary, Vintage, published 1993, page 64:

     Temple entered the dining-room from the kitchen, her face fixed in a cringing, placative expression [...].

   • 1935, Russell Thorndike, The Scarecrow Rides:

     […] a magnificent cold supper was awaiting him in the dining-room, where he did full justice to a game pie and a bottle of claret.

   • 1938, Norman Lindsay, Age of Consent, 1st Australian edition, Sydney, N.S.W.: Ure Smith, published 1962, →OCLC, page 158:

     The dinner that they sat down to in the fly-specked dining-room was of boiled beef and carrots, with a turgid ginger pudding to follow, though Grierson went down to the cellar himself and found some dusty bottles of hock, overlooked for years because there was no demand for it in a beer-drinking community.

   • 1954, British Broadcasting Corporation, The Listener, volume 51, page 67:

     Her French-speaking table in the dining-room is a riot of second-rate behaviour and dexterously aimed bread-pellets; the stairs outside her bedroom are relentlessly buttered and she comes purler after purler.

   • 1956 [1880], Johanna Spyri, Heidi, translation of original by Eileen Hall, page 71:

     This at least Heidi could understand, and she followed her obediently into the dining-room.

   • 1956, Anthony Burgess, Time for a Tiger (The Malayan Trilogy), published 1972, page 44:

     The swing-doors which opened on to his dining-room creaked[.]

   • 1969, David Wright, Deafness: A personal Account, Faber & Faber, read in Jill Jepson, No Walls of Stone: An Anthology of Literature by Deaf and Hard of Hearing Writers, Gallaudet University Press (2002) →ISBN, p. 156,

     I was ushered along a dark cupboardy passage that led to the dining-room.

   • 1976, Arnold Wesker -, The Plays of Arnold Wesker, page 3:

     But throughout the morning there are about three or four who wander in and out carrying glasses from the glassery to the dining-room and performing duties which are mentioned in the course of the play.

   • 1997 October 1, P[hyllis] D[orothy] James, chapter 20, in A Certain Justice, London: Faber and Faber, →ISBN, page 181:

     A good-sized drawing-room and dining-room and two double bedrooms – you won't need more. Twenty-four-hour porterage and a modern security system.

   • 2004 May 30, Terry Durack, “Going round in circles”, in The Independent on Sunday, page 35:

     Suffice to say there is a downstairs dining-room of almost old Hollywood glamour broken up with filmy, flowing curtains, columns and boothettes, strangely juxtaposed with tall high tables and stools.

   • 2010, Stephen Fry, The Fry Chronicles: An Autobiography:

     The prefect grabbed me by the shoulders and steered me down a passageway, and down another and finally through a door that led into a long, low dining-room crowded with loudly breakfasting boys sitting on long, shiny oak forms, as benches used to be called.

   • 2022 May 13, Athol Daily News, volume LXXXVII, number 389, page B9:

     Open layout includes kitchen, a formal dining-room, living-room, half bath and laundry.