cafe au lait
- noun
- /ˌkæfeɪ oʊ ˈleɪ/
:
café au lait
- At the café, she loves to sip her cafe au lait while reading a book.
Examples
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Cafe au lait and a croissant.
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Drink your cafe au lait.
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Cafe au lait, snails, french fries?
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Cafe au lait, please.
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I ordered a cafe au lait to enjoy with my breakfast.
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After dinner, we shared a cafe au lait and discussed our plans for the weekend.
Surface Forms
Morphology
cafe + au + lait
This is a compositional French loan phrase: 'café' (coffee) + 'au' (with/to the) + 'lait' (milk), so a learner who knows the constituent meanings can readily infer 'coffee with milk'. Cross-linguistic parallels (e.g., Spanish 'café con leche') and the literal, non-idiomatic structure make the meaning transparent to a B1 learner familiar with the parts.
Etymology
Cafe au lait comes from French and literally means 'coffee with milk', with the words cafe meaning 'coffee', au meaning 'with', and lait meaning 'milk'. It was originally used for hot coffee mixed with hot milk, often in equal parts, so today the phrase still names that mixed drink.
