A small, open shelving unit or a small elevator used to move dishes, food, or goods between floors in a building, usually in a house or restaurant.
Named humorously because it's a 'dumb' (silent, non-speaking) servant that delivers items—a pun on the human servant called a 'waiter,' gaining the term in the 1700s.
The dumbwaiter is one of history's best wordplay jokes: it's called 'dumb' because unlike a human waiter, it can't talk back—yet this clever pun became the official architectural term.
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