Valet
noun, verb ·Moderate ·College level
Definitions
- 1 A man's personal male attendant, responsible for his clothes and appearance.
- 2 a manservant who acts as a personal attendant to their employer wordnet
- 3 A hotel employee performing such duties for guests.
- 4 A female performer in professional wrestling, acting as either a manager or personal chaperone; often used to attract and titillate male members of the audience.
- 5 A female chaperone who accompanies a man, and is usually not married to him.
Show 4 more definitions
- 6 A person employed to clean or park cars. US
"A HEROIC dad who helped deliver his new-born baby in the back of his car had to explain to his car valet that he wasn't involved in illegal crime."
- 7 A person employed to assist the jockey and trainer at a racecourse.
- 8 A wooden stand on which to hold clothes and accessories in preparation for dressing.
- 9 A kind of goad or stick with an iron point.
- 1 To serve (someone) as a valet. transitive
"You can valet me, can you? Bother valeting me! I like to put on my own clothes, and brush them, too, when they are on; and if I only knew how to black my own boots, by George I should like to do it!"
- 2 serve as a personal attendant to wordnet
- 3 To clean and service (a car), as a valet does. Ireland, UK, transitive
"He revealed: “We had been through a lot and I decided the car needed to be cleaned out after Georgina had to deliver the baby in the car. “You can imagine the scene when I left the car in for valeting. I got some funny looks and I had to explain to the guy that I wasn’t up to anything illegal because it did look a bit like a crime scene.”"
- 4 To leave (a car) with a valet to park it. US, transitive
"I asked Giacomo if he ever valeted his car, and he twisted his face into a grimace as he replied, “Rarely, but I have done it. Nervous time.”"
Example
More examples"If a restaurant has valet parking it's probably pretty expensive."
Etymology
Borrowed from Middle French valet, from Old French vaslet, from Medieval Latin *vassellittus, diminutive of Late Latin vassallus (“manservant, domestic, retainer”), from vassus (“servant”), from Gaulish *wassos (“young man, squire”), from Proto-Celtic *wastos (“servant”) (compare Old Irish foss and Welsh gwas). Doublet of varlet.
Related phrases
More for "valet"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.