à la carte
/ˌɑ.ləˈkɑɹt/
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 3.04 in modern English
9
Scrabble Score
8
Letters
2
Syllables
7
Unique Chars
Meaning
adv
By ordering individually priced items from the menu.
Example Sentences
- "The restaurant had a huge à la carte menu and four specials that day."
- "As twin studies proliferated throughout the nineteen-eighties, their results contributed to substantial changes in our moral intuitions. When schizophrenia and autism, for example, turned out to be largely heritable, we no longer blamed these disorders on cold or inept mothers. But, for such freighted traits as intelligence, liberals remained understandably anxious and continued to insist that differences—not just on a group level but on an individual one—were merely artifacts of an unequal environment. Conservatives pointed out that an à-la-carte approach to scientific findings was intellectually incoherent."
- "There were two divisions in the restaurants I used to visit. One division, which was patronized by fairly well-to-do people, provided any number of courses from which one chose and paid for à la carte, each dinner thus costing from one to two shillings. The other division provided six-penny dinners of three courses with a slice of bread. In my days of strict frugality I usually dined in the second division."
- "DCI Tom Barnaby: You don't do eye of newt or toe of frog, wool of bat or tongue of dog, then? Waitress: Not à la carte, sir."
Etymology
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /ˌɑ.ləˈkɑɹt/
- British English: /ˌæ.ləˈkɑːt/
Inflected Forms
a la carte (alternative)
à-la-carte (alternative)