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Glite Dictionary
🍽️ A portion 📄 Delivery of documents 💻 Sending data
serving

serving

15 8.1
Giving a legal document to the person named in it
  • noun
  • /ˈsɜrvɪŋ/
  • Formal
translation icon : notificación
  • You're a regular process-serving savant.
  • self-serving
  • long-serving
  • serving bias

Outcomes a sheriff going You've been served.

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Examples

  • Preceded at 8:45 a.m. with serving of bagels and coffee in the community room.

    Blog text (21)

  • Jerry E. Trapnell is the former, long-serving Vice President and Chief Accreditation Officer for AACSB International.

    Academic text (2016)

  • That party gets served and then they have the like they get to show up in court during this hearing.

  • There's one serving time at the State Penitentiary.

    Zero Effect (1998)

  • I'll bet the President realized that you can't have voters asking why the second longest-serving F.B.I. Director got fired for doing his job.

    The Kingdom (2007)

  • Amid the clatter of the serving of the soup, I studied Miss Grange across the table.

    Fiction book (2000)

  • The serving of the legal documents was completed by the sheriff's office early this morning.

  • After the serving of the summons, the defendant had twenty days to respond to the court.

  • He waited nervously for the serving of the restraining order, which would mandate his absence from the premises.

Synonyms

service
vsserving
  • Jargon
19 7.7

A formal delivery of legal papers to a person

stresses delivery specifically to the addressed person rather than a general legal requirement
service of process
vsserving
  • Formal
1 8.4

The act of giving legal papers to someone to start a court case

focuses on giving the document directly to the person named

Compounds

serving dish
3 1.0

A dish used to hold food for people to share at the table

serving girl
  • Archaic
1 5.1

A girl or young woman who works in a home doing chores

serving cart
  • US
2.8

A small table with wheels for carrying and serving food and drinks

Surface Forms

serving singular
servings plural

Morphology

serving = serve (transparent) = serve + ing

A direct nominalization/gerund from the verb 'serve' denoting the act of delivering a document; the legal sense is a domain-specific instantiation but follows the expected '-ing' nominalization.

Etymology

Serving comes from the Latin servire 'to serve' and is the same root as the verb serve and the noun server. In law, 'serving' means handing official papers to someone, so the origin helps: it is literally the act of giving or delivering those documents.