Reservations or appointments made in advance, typically for services, events, or accommodations. Also refers to official records or charges made by police.
From Old English bōc (book, written record) + the suffix -ing, literally meaning 'the act of recording in a book.' The reservation sense developed in the 19th century from the practice of writing appointments in ledger books.
The hospitality industry processes billions of bookings annually, but the word's origin in literal book-keeping reveals how recent our digital reservation systems really are! Until the 1960s, most hotels and restaurants still used actual physical books to track reservations, writing names by hand in chronological order.
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