A course is a division of a meal, consisting of a single dish or of a set of dishes brought to the table all at once. From the sixteenth to the middle of the nineteenth century, most formal dinners had two or three courses plus a dessert. The name of this basic meal division, the course, derives ultimately from the Latin verb currere, meaning to run: currere gave rise to the Latin cursus, signifying a running, which developed into the French word cours, which was borrowed by English as course at the beginning of the fourteenth century. The word course originally meant a sequence of stages, but eventually it also came to mean a stage in a sequence. The culinary course is, of course, related to the many other English words that derive from the Latin currere, including current, courier, cursor, and occur.