diner
Americannoun
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a person who dines.
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a railroad dining car.
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a restaurant built like such a car.
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a small, informal, and usually inexpensive restaurant.
noun
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a person eating a meal, esp in a restaurant
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a small restaurant, often at the roadside
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a fashionable bar, or a section of one, where food is served
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of diner
Explanation
A diner is a person who's eating a meal, and it's also a word for a casual restaurant. If you pass by a diner in a diner, check out what's on his plate. It could be anything from eggs over easy to salisbury steak. If you dine in a cafe you're a diner, and if you eat in the dining car on a train, you can call it a diner too. Your favorite neighborhood diner — a casual restaurant that keeps late hours and serves a variety of food — is actually named after these railroad restaurants. The original diners, from the 1930s, were shaped like train cars, often clad in stainless steel, and had long, narrow space inside with stools along a counter.
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
"Wimbledon just has this magic, and so much of that comes from the traditions you look forward to every single year," one diner told the newspaper, external.
From BBC ● Jul. 7, 2026
“I think it can do a lot of good,” said Ray Thompson, a prominent entrepreneur who owns Sykes, a diner in Kalispell, the Flathead County seat.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 5, 2026
“Doing those songs on tour was really hard,” Beatty says over a cup of tea on a recent afternoon at a Silver Lake diner.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 24, 2026
To build it they flipped the longtime Silver Spoon diner into their modern seafood shack, alongside their business partners Donato Poto, Amy Specter Nickoloff and Craig Nickoloff.
From Los Angeles Times ● May 23, 2026
We turned on Main and strolled past the scoop shop, the diner, the post office, the bookstore, the record-shop-turned-CD-shop-turned-vintage-everything-shop.
From "The Season of Styx Malone" by Kekla Magoon
Saunders also noted that Cracker Barrel is still not exactly a destination for diners outside of its most loyal customers.
From MarketWatch ● Jul. 28, 2026
It lowered prices to $19.95 and up to attract more diners, and cut its operating hours to stem losses.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 24, 2026
The chain moved out of the country in 2010 after failing to attract Mexican diners.
From BBC ● Jul. 14, 2026
At times, diners will win don virtual reality headgear.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 8, 2026
They are the last of the diners to leave.
From "The Namesake" by Jhumpa Lahiri
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
