I'd never heard of this before. Growing up in rural Scotland, meals were always "Breakfast", "Dinner" and "Tea". There was sometimes confusion with other people over whether dinner was a midday or evening meal, but I'd never thought much of it until now.

I'm also originally from rural Scotland (around Tomintoul), for us it was "Breakfast", "Dinner" and "Supper".

Upon moving to the central belt, and ingratiating myself into more middle class circles of friends I then discovered:

Breakfast - eaten usually when you get up in the morning, say early morning until ~1030am

Lunch - eaten from 12pm until ~2:30pm

Afternoon Tea - taken from around 3:30pm until 4:30pm (cakes/biscuits [cookies] and would also include some kind of sandwich - often cut into triangles)

Tea - 5pm until 6pm - usually a lighter two course meal (say an omlette) and some pudding (desert).

Dinner - taken from 7pm until perhaps 9pm - this would be a fully laiden two or three course meal.

Supper - taken from around 10pm until around 11pm (or just before bedtime) - likely cheese on toast or crackers & cheese and a cuppa.

Obviously you don't need to have every one of these meals every day of the week.

I see where Tolkien got his inspiration for Hobbit meals...

A bit further south, Yorkshire in England, but yea the language is the same there.

He's actually missing out elevenses and brunch.

And then there is "Second Breakfast". Or was that only in the movies?

I've heard "Second Breakfast" is actually a thing with farmers, i.e. they get up super early (say 4am) to feed the livestock or do some other such thing (cow milking?) and they have a lightish breakfast - a cuppa, some cereal or maybe toast. Then later on, say 730am-8am, once these tasks are done and dusted, they head back to the farmhouse where they have a more hearty affair - sausages, bacon, eggs.

Damn, forgot about brunch. Too late to edit in now. I left out elevenses because that's really just a cup of tea and a rich tea or digestive. I feel you need a bit more than that for it to be classified as a proper meal.

Yes and frunch!

In spanish I think all countries agree on at least: desayuno (breakfast), comida (lunch), cena (dinner) as the three basic. But we also have merienda and almuerzo which get different times and portions depending on country.

And there can be other terms of course. In Guadalajara, México, where I live, schools say "hora del lonche" (lunch time) to the midday meal.

'Desayuno, comida y cena' is how people refer to the main meals in the Dominican Republic, 'almuerzo' is also used to mean lunch but mostly in formal settings. I also just asked a Colombian friend and he says 'comida' is mostly used to refer to dinner, and 'almuerzo' for lunch.

Edit: He also says 'cena' is a more formal, less common way to refer to dinner.

Lunch is most commonly "almuerzo" in my experience, with some variation. I think there are some Europeans and perhaps pockets of Latin Americans who use "comida" to refer to either lunch or dinner as a meal, while most people use it to refer to food in general. Dinner is "merienda" in some places, while many others reserve the common "cena" for dinner and use "merienda" to refer to an afternoon snack.

Interesting. In Puerto Rico, comida meant food and almuerzo meant lunch.

'La Comida' as the main meal of the day at approximately lunchtime is a Castillian term and generally a Spanish (in the sense of: people that live in Spain) practice. The practice and this sense of the term 'comida' aren't common in Latin America, in my experience.

My kid's learning Spanish in school and she learned: desayuno, almuerzo, cena.

Google translate translates lunch first as almuerzo and second as comida if you try it.

What about second breakfast and elevenses?

In the North of England and Scotland it's usually Breakfast, Dinner, and Tea. If you go down South it's Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner.

And sometimes if you're really lucky you'll meet a Southerner who'll freak out about it, "Ha! You said 'dinner' but you meant 'lunch'!! Ha! Ha! When do you eat your lunch?! Ha Ha!!"

I had an old boss that did this regularly. The dick.

We usually have one main meal, and another that is lighter and more like a snack.

If you have the main meal in the middle of the day then it is called "dinner". The snack you have at the end of the afternoon is "tea".

If you have the main meal at the end of the afternoon it is "dinner". The snack you eat in the middle of the day is "lunch".

The difference probably depends on if you go home for a meal at mid-day or not. The later is probably more traditional as people used to work or study much closer to home. And there was somebody around during the day to prepare a meal. But nowadays going home for a main meal in the middle of the day is unusual so we all just have a small snack.

It can be confusing when other languages get added to the mix, because they don't necessarily follow that convention. E.g. in Russian, you traditionally translate the main meal of the day as "dinner" in English - but it's actually eaten early in the afternoon (usually around 1pm), so it's more like lunch in that regard, and honestly should probably just be rendered as such. I often found that whenever I would refer to "dinner" in my conversation, my (native English speaking) friends would automatically assume the end-of-the-afternoon meal; and the idea of having a dinner with colleagues implies some sort of highly formal event.

On the other hand, the after-work evening meal is usually less heavy, and is rendered as "supper" in English. And, again, I find that Americans usually assume that it takes place much later than it normally does, and is also much lighter than it normally is (basically a snack rather than a proper meal), if I use that word.

So clearly there is some implicit time-of-day mapping there.

Thanks, that was very informative.

I was always told that dinner (from "dine") is the main meal of the day. So if you have a 'fancy' afternoon meal that can be your dinner (e.g. we usually do Christmas dinner between 3 and 4).

I wonder if HN knows of a linguistic map for meal names, it appears that these words shift meaning a lot.

EDIT: I thought this was interesting -- "Harvard's Dialect Survey had the question, 'What is the distinction between dinner and supper?' Here's the geographic distribution of their results from 10,661 American respondents" https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/22446/lunch-vs-d...

The slightly snooty Daily Telegraph style guide:

"Christmas lunch is what most of our readers would eat, not Christmas dinner. Use the latter only if referring specifically to an evening meal."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/topics/about-us/style-book/143530...

(Being slightly facetious) This confirms my suspicion that the Telegraph caters to a very small minority:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Christmas+lunc...

Also this:

https://trends.google.co.uk/trends/explore?q=Christmas%20lun...

Even in Southern England (Cambridge), I don't think I've ever heard the phrase "Christmas lunch".

If you're ready for Christmas dinner at lunchtime there was something wrong with Christmas breakfast.

I find this particular stuff fascinating.

In spanish you have 3 distinct meals, 'desayuno' 'almuerzo' and 'cena' mapping strictly to a moment of the day, more or less 'breakfast' 'lunch' and 'dinner', with the option of a merienda (roughly 'tea' but usually just sweet food like cookies or some such) between lunch and dinner. Each of this happens on a specific moment of the day (morning, noon, the optional afternoon thing and well into nighttime).

Are there other languages/dialects where the word maps the importance of the meal instead of the actual time it is consumed?

I don't think it's as easy as geography, it depends on your parents upbringing too.

One other great British-English question is "what do you call an individually portioned baked bread article" ... roll, barm, bap, cob, ...

Scottish git here....rolls (or maybe morning rolls if posh). But where I'm from in Scotland you'd ask for "softies" otherwise you'd get a slightly harder well-fired roll if there was a choice.

Or "How do you pronounce 'scone'?"

Breadcake

In my part of the world (Nova Scotia, Canada), "dinner" often means either lunch or the largest meal of the day. When planning for Christmas dinner I've found myself asking, "Lunch dinner or supper dinner?"

I grew up in England and it was similar. Growing up Dinner was the hot meal using taken in the middle of the day either at school (dinner ladies), or at work (I imagined hot meals servers in factories or canteens). And tea (teatime!) was cold/lighter possibly taken with tea, essentially late afternoon tea, followed by supper later in the evening. Pretty sure it’s still like this in many places.

At some point dinner transitioned to lunch and teatime to dinner for us.

We (USA) say breakfast, lunch, and dinner, though my grandparents would say supper instead of dinner sometimes. I wonder where/when the split occurred.

I think you’ll find supper in common usage in the US but always as the same meal as dinner which is the evening meal.

Dinner is definitely most common near me but I wouldn’t blink if someone asked me over for supper or said it’s supper time.

Same here (also USA). My parents (born 1930s) say breakfast, lunch, dinner. My grandparents (born 1900s) said breakfast, dinner, supper. My grandmother asserted that her usage was more proper.

There is tons of disagreement about this stuff, as it varies so much region to region, but in general, in most English peaking places:

The three meals are "Breakfast", "Lunch" and "Supper". And if Lunch or Supper is the biggest/most formal meal of the day it may be called "Dinner" instead. Hence family "Christmas Dinner" may be at lunch time, but your "Dinner party" is in the evening.

I have only encountered “supper” as the name of a primary meal in parts of the USA. I think “breakfast, lunch, dinner” likely is the most widespread formulation. I never heard “supper” in Australia or Canada at all.

Its all highly regional, but I believe my characterization is an accurate generalization. Checkout the "Word Origin and History for X" for:

1. http://www.dictionary.com/browse/supper 2. http://www.dictionary.com/browse/dinner

Interesting side note, Sup (verb) the root word for supper has been in the (old) English language since before 900 AD.

FWIW, I was taught "breakfast", "dinner", "supper" at school, and their English courses were supposed to closely follow British usage (although I'm not sure which regional dialects, if any specific ones, they tracked in practice). We were taught "lunch" as well, but it was treated more like a second breakfast.

Thanks, I was always confused about why people talk about having "Thanksgiving Dinner" in the early afternoon and now it makes perfect sense.

In farms in Ireland its typically Breakfast - Dinner - Tea. Where your main meal of the day (dinner) is around 12-1pm and the evening meal (tea) is light. Your occasional cup of tea before bed is supper.

Outside of farming people have their main meal (dinner) when they come home from their office in the evening. So the lighter meal in the afternoon becomes lunch and theres no tea.

Interesting! Never heard anyone use "tea" to describe the evening meal. Tea refers to the light meal at late afternoon, after lunch and before the evening meal (dinner) at my place, seems to be same as the "common" usage.

BTW, Cantonese is actually a "chai language": the character 茶 (tea) reads like "char" as in charcoal, without the h sound and in a low tone.

In Ireland people would traditionally have had breakfast, then dinner, then tea as the three meals. Now that only happens in the country or on Sundays.

My grandparents (Scottish) use "afternoon tea" for the light meal you describe, and the evening meal is interchangeably "tea" or "supper". Confusingly, the lunch meal is "dinner".

I knew there was a heavy class difference here, but apparently there's also substantial regional difference even within the British Isles.

You're the second person to say that their grandparents use breakfast/dinner/supper. Here's the other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16134094 - note that the author is from US!

Now I'm really curious, because breakfast/dinner/supper is what I was taught in school, English being my second language. And I also very quickly found that it doesn't match common usage in any of the countries I've been too... but I thought that it's because of an attempt to better reflect the times of the meals in translation that backfired. Now it sounds like they were basically just teaching us English circa first third of the 20th century?

In standard American English, dinner always refers to the main meal of the day. In traditional agrarian contexts, the meals were breakfast, dinner, and a light later meal called supper. Supper is related to the word soup and is therefore similar in connotation to the North English/Scottish use of tea to refer to a later light meal by the name of one of its (potential) components.

The shift over time from breakfast, dinner, and supper to breakfast, lunch, and dinner primarily reflects changing socioeconomic realities rather than some fundamental lexical shift.

Fairly well-off family in the Ozarks, USA. We only say "dinner" when it's a special occasion and it isn't in the morning. For normal meals it's breakfast, lunch, supper. Most of my classmates in elementary school (many of whom had not enjoyed those "changing socioeconomic realities") were the same.

I feel like you're conflating "traditional agrarian" with "rural." I also feel like you're conflating "changing socioeconomic realities" with "people getting rich or well-off."

Was your elementary school in a one-room schoolhouse? Did most people go home for the mid-day meal? Was school in session through the summer and winter with breaks for the planting season and the harvest? Did most people stop going after 6th, 7th, or 8th grade? If not, then I feel like your post may be non-responsive to mine.

Yes I probably misunderstood you, because I have no idea what you meant by "standard American English". I'm an American and I speak English, and my rural neighbors are the same, so I thought I would report my observations. Around here we rarely use the word "dinner" for meals eaten in one's own home.

I think breakfast/dinner/supper was standard usage among my extended family in Alabama -- I have to say "was" because I haven't been there since the early 1970s, but I wouldn't be surprised if it hadn't changed.

What do you mean by “without the h sound” ? “Charcoal” doesn’t have an h sound as far as I can tell.

They probably mean voiceless alveolar affricate, similar to "zz" in Italian pizza.

The first syllable in charcoal reads "tʃɑ:" in IPA. I was referring to the "ʃ" sound, formally the "voiceless palato-alveolar fricative" according to Wikipedia.

So, a “sh” sound, right?

> It does mention that that usage is a class marker but then conflates it with the pastry-and-tea afternoon snack practice of upper classes. They are two radically disjoint uses.

Yep, that looks like a serious mistake. My impression is that 'tea' or 'high tea' describes an all-class, or primarily lower class, nighttime meal. "Afternoon tea" describes the ~4 PM snack with sweet pastries instead of a primary meal.

A bit of investigation says that our mutual impression is correct, but complicated by Scotland, where "high tea" may be served with the size and timing of "afternoon tea" but with heavier, savory dishes on offer.

https://www.thespruce.com/afternon-vs-high-tea-difference-43...

https://afternoontea.co.uk/information/what-is-high-tea/

This is so interesting! So your mom grew up in a Marathi family in Guangdong?

No, in Ipoh, Malaysia, where there were (unsurprisingly) few Maharashtrians, though plenty of Tamils and Sikhs due to te British Empire. Mostly Chinese people though so she needed to communicate in Marathi, Hokkien (Fujianese), Cantonese, and Malay. Then the country was (re-)invaded; the Japanese had schools (pretty much only for Indians) and taught them Japanese; after that the English came back and she learnt English.

In fact, though I also use three languages, the only one she and I have in common is English. Though I learnt some Marathi as a kid it was just how to read and how to talk about family relations (so limited in the European languages!) and food. We were in a part of Australia that hadn't yet heard that the White Australia laws had been abolished so speaking anything but English, even in your own home, was Very Bad, and emphasized your wog status.

I run into Mumbaikars and Punekars all the time here in the bay area but most are Hindi speakers.

That's amazing!

That is such a weird combination.

Most Maharashtrians I know from the previous generation (including my parents) are from Maharashtra, and Maharashtrians have somewhat of a reputation for not wanting to leave Maharashtra.

The Pune I remember from my childhood was a nice, if quiet place with lots of trees, and the wonderful Deccan climate so I can understand not wanting to move.

Now it's become just another huge city IMHO.

I know, right?

Tea is cha in Cantonese, not te.