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deli

nounattested in dialogue

  • //ˈdɛli//

A shop that sells cooked or prepared food ready for serving.

noun

  1. 1

    informalA shop that sells cooked or prepared food ready for serving.

    Delis usually offer a broader, fresher menu than fast food chains.

    The San Juan market is Mexico City's most famous deli of exotic meats, where an adventurous shopper can hunt down hard-to-find critters such as ostrich, wild boar and crocodile.

    Where rectangular storage containers make a mess of mismatched lids and sometimes unstackable shapes, the ordinary cylindrical deli cups used for food delivery are far superior.

    Part of the 'western arcade' (as it's known) is lined with delis, cafes and other shops, giving it the feeling of a bazaar.

  2. 2

    informalFood sold at a delicatessen.

Etymology

Attested since 1954. Clipping of delicatessen, from German Delikatessen, plural of Delikatesse (“delicacy, fine food”), from French délicatesse, derived from the adjective délicat, from Latin delicatus.

Forms

plural
delis
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).