Waitron
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 A waiter or waitress. nonstandard, rare
"With adolescent perversity, he turned up his nose at all of the elegant French items on the Closerie's menu and scandalized the waitron by demanding corned-beef hash—fried extra crisp—with poached eggs, a slice of fresh papaya with lime, banana-walnut bread, and a pitcher of Mexican chocolate."
- 2 A robotic or mechanical waiter. dated
Example
More examples"With adolescent perversity, he turned up his nose at all of the elegant French items on the Closerie's menu and scandalized the waitron by demanding corned-beef hash—fried extra crisp—with poached eggs, a slice of fresh papaya with lime, banana-walnut bread, and a pitcher of Mexican chocolate."
Etymology
Coined as a gender-neutral substitute for waiter and waitress, this is one of the few words with the gender-neutral suffix -ron to have seen much use, probably re-inforced by rhyming with patron. (Some references instead analyse it as using the same "machinelike" suffix -tron as waitron (“mechanical waiter”), but more likely it uses -ron like laundron and like waiter and waitress use -er/-ress not *-ter/*-tress.)
From waiter + -tron.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.