banchetto

The trail runs from Italian banchetto (a small bench or table), diminutive of banco (bench), through French banquet, into English by the fifteenth century. The original sense was modest: a banchetto was a light meal or a between-courses snack served at a small table, not the grand feast the word now implies. The shift from bench to feast happened in French, where the word inflated over two centuries.

By the sixteenth century, a banquet in English meant a formal, elaborate dinner with multiple courses. Henry VIII's banquets were legendary — the Hampton Court kitchens served hundreds of guests with roast meats, pastries, and subtleties (sugar sculptures). The word had completed its transformation from small table to enormous feast. The bench was forgotten.

The banquet also had a specifically sweet meaning in Tudor and Stuart England. A 'banquet course' was a dessert course served in a separate room — often a banqueting house in the garden. Banqueting houses were built specifically for this purpose. The Banqueting House in Whitehall, completed in 1622, was designed by Inigo Jones for exactly these post-dinner sweet courses. The building survives. The dessert definition does not.

Modern banquets are institutional: wedding banquets, awards banquets, state banquets, fundraising banquets. The word implies scale, formality, and usually a podium. A banquet is a dinner with speeches. The bench that started it would not seat a tenth of the guests. The furniture became a feast that became an event that outgrew every room the furniture could fit in.