In India "hotel" often refers to a restaurant. This is not an innovation; it's actually preserved an older sense of the word. A thread 🧵on the #etymology of "hotel" in South Asia. 1/
https://twitter.com/avtansa/status/1549540874807386113
English hotel is from French hôtel, from Middle French hostel. The Middle French word is also the source of English hostel. In French, the circumflex (eg. ô) usually marks the historic presence of a consonant like s. Another example is forêt, which was forest in Middle French. 2/
The French is from medieval Latin hospitāle "guesthouse" (think "hospitality"). All of these words—hotel, hostel, hospital—originally referred to inns or shelters for travelers to stay and rest. 3/
The function of a "hotel" or "hospital" is thus originally the same: a place of rest and recovery for weary travelers, the poor, and the sick. People staying at a hotel would also be given food; the culture of eating at standalone restaurants came much later in history. 4/
So a "hotel" was somewhere you could stay to rest and enjoy a meal when traveling. The word would have still had these associations with food when English was first introduced to the subcontinent, which predates modern restaurant culture. 5/
In Europe, the culture of dining out in restaurants began to take off in late 18th century Paris. It's not until 1806 that we have the first records of the word "restaurant" being used in English. 6/
"Restaurant" also comes from French, where it literally means "restoring" (health, strength) and originally referred to the food itself which would "restore" you. 7/
Eventually "restaurant" became the word for dining establishment in varieties of English spoken in the UK, US, and elsewhere, with hotel restricted to the sense of "inn", but Indian English continues to use "hotel" in its older sense: both a place to sleep & a place to eat! 8/end
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