Dabbawalla

noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    A deliveryperson in Mumbai, India who collects freshly cooked food in lunchboxes from workers' residences (mostly in the suburbs), delivers it to their respective workplaces, and returns the empty containers. India

    "“There is a service called FedEx that is similar to ours — but they don’t deliver lunch,” said one dabbawalla, Dhondu Kondaji Chowdhury."

Example

More examples

"“There is a service called FedEx that is similar to ours — but they don’t deliver lunch,” said one dabbawalla, Dhondu Kondaji Chowdhury."

Etymology

Borrowed from Marathi डबेवाला (ḍabevālā), Hindi डब्बावाला (ḍabbāvālā), literally "person with a box".

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.