cafe
Pluralcafes
- 1Alternative form of café.
She spent the rainy afternoon reading in a quiet cafe.
A new cafe opened downtown, complete with outdoor seating.
Note
The same word as café with the French accent left off. It carries every meaning of the accented form, including the Canadian use for a small restaurant of any kind, and its plural is simply cafes. Vivian Song, writing in 2025 about Parisian coffee bars, uses this spelling even for the cafes of Paris itself. Choosing it over café changes the spelling only, not the sense.
- 2A convenience store, originally one specializing in coffee and similar basic items.
Every morning she buys her bread and sugar from the corner cafe.
The neighborhood cafe carried everything from canned soup to batteries.
Note
South African English has stretched the word into everyday shopping. Here a cafe is the corner shop where you pick up bread, sugar or batteries, not a place to sit over a drink. The coffee it first sold survives mostly in the name. Readers elsewhere will think of the coffee-shop sense, so when writing for an international audience, gloss it as a corner shop or convenience store.
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