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Mary G
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In California growing up it was breakfast, lunch and dinner (our late morning/early afternoon huge meal was brunch and Sunday dinner).
In Austria it was breakfast, dinner and supper -- and in most of Europe, supper was really a snack while dinner was a BIG midday meal (and then, of course a nap afterwards).
In the South -- SC, NC and GA -- it was breakfast, lunch and supper.
Here in Colorado, the kids eat all day so we just have "food" 
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MaryG
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Kathryn UK
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doris wrote:
Breakfast, lunch and supper here for us in the UK!
Having said that, lots of people would say dinner for the midday meal -- for example, it's always 'school dinner' not school lunch, and my mother (who says lunch otherwise) would say 'dinner' to refer to a small child's midday meal. And it's always 'Christmas dinner', never Christmas lunch.
I think it's also regional/class related here. The evening meal is more often 'tea' in the north of England. |
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Oh, dear! That's me firmly slapped down the social scale  ... we have breakfast, lunch and tea. That Yorkshire mother of mine! I grew up with breakfast, dinner and tea; dh grew up with breakfast, lunch and supper. We seem to have unwittingly compromised somewhere in the middle.
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insegnante
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I grew up in Brooklyn, NY and have been in the DC area for about 7 years.
The midday meal has always been lunch.
Supper and dinner were usually pretty interchangeable terms to me growing up and I don't know if we used one more than the other. But I do think I associated dinner with slightly more formality and supper with less, but that was in terms of general word usage, not our home meals where plain old spaghetti and meatballs on a random Tuesday night at the kitchen table could be called dinner. But overall the word supper makes me think of less formal plates and utensils and simple food -- something eaten by a family with kids stopping in the middle of outside play on a summer evening, or a plain light meal during Lent, or the evening meal for people in a monastery!
As informal as it usually is, we now always say dinner for our own evening meal. I forget but I think my Northern Virginia native husband says it was always called dinner when he was growing up.
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Essy
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Dawn wrote:
We have lunch at noon and supper at the end of the day. Dinner is what we have on holidays and Sundays around 1 p.m. - as in Thanksgiving Dinner or Sunday Dinner. It's a bigger, more formal meal.
I grew up north of Boston and still live here!  |
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Hey...I'm north of Boston too...but it's lunch and dinner at our house...lol.
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lapazfarm
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Lunch and dinner here. We live in NC but are originally from FL with "FL cracker" and Italian roots on my side and Hispanic (Cuban)on dh's. I only mention that because FL is so strongly influenced by immigration from both the Northern states and from other countries that it's culture is quite different from the rest of the south.
Around here, they say lunch and supper, I believe.
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ShawnaB
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Lunch and Dinner here in California. Although my Oklahoma grandmother has Breakfast, Dinna, and Suppa.
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JSchaaf
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"Lupper": A meal eaten around 4pm on a day that lunch was skipped because a huge, late breakfast was served that morning.
And are "elevenses" a second breakfast or early lunch??
Jennifer
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teachingmom
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insegnante wrote:
Supper and dinner were usually pretty interchangeable terms to me growing up and I don't know if we used one more than the other. But I do think I associated dinner with slightly more formality and supper with less, but that was in terms of general word usage, not our home meals where plain old spaghetti and meatballs on a random Tuesday night at the kitchen table could be called dinner. But overall the word supper makes me think of less formal plates and utensils and simple food -- something eaten by a family with kids stopping in the middle of outside play on a summer evening, or a plain light meal during Lent, or the evening meal for people in a monastery!
As informal as it usually is, we now always say dinner for our own evening meal. |
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Exactly what she said!
I have almost the same geographical background too. I was born in NYC to parents who both grew up there. We moved to the DC suburbs when I was around 3 and I've basically lived here since.
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Erin
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Kathryn UK wrote:
doris wrote:
Breakfast, lunch and supper here for us in the UK!
Having said that, lots of people would say dinner for the midday meal -- for example, it's always 'school dinner' not school lunch, and my mother (who says lunch otherwise) would say 'dinner' to refer to a small child's midday meal. And it's always 'Christmas dinner', never Christmas lunch.
I think it's also regional/class related here. The evening meal is more often 'tea' in the north of England. |
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Oh, dear! That's me firmly slapped down the social scale ... we have breakfast, lunch and tea. That Yorkshire mother of mine! I grew up with breakfast, dinner and tea; dh grew up with breakfast, lunch and supper. We seem to have unwittingly compromised somewhere in the middle. |
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Showing our English origins here We call it breakfast, lunch and tea. It is a little 'class related'. Some would call it dinner. Most Australians would say tea however.
Supper is a late night snack, like hot chocolate and a biscuit.
Dinner is something more formal like Christmas or Sunday dinner which generally translates to a roast (preferably lamb) It can be had at lunch or teatime.
Oh and we live on the Far North Coast of NSW Australia.
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doris
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Kathryn UK wrote:
Oh, dear! That's me firmly slapped down the social scale ... we have breakfast, lunch and tea. That Yorkshire mother of mine! I grew up with breakfast, dinner and tea; dh grew up with breakfast, lunch and supper. We seem to have unwittingly compromised somewhere in the middle. |
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Oh dear -- no offence meant!  I did wonder as I wrote it whether other Brits would be sufficiently north of Watford to regard 'tea' as the norm
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Jess
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We have lunch at mid day and supper or dinner (we use either) in the evening. Grew up in TX.
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kingvozzo
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I just asked dh about his experience growing up in Mississippi. His family had lunch and dinner, but he said that lots of families he knew had dinner and supper. His parents were from Maryland; presumably his friends parents were native Mississippians.
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marihalojen
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We have lunch at noon and supper at the end of the day. Dinner is a bigger, more formal meal and can be used pretty interchangably with supper if something special is going on, a birthday or holiday or even just a lit candle! But lunch is always at midday.
I grew up in Colorado and Northern California but moved to Missouri in my teens. So for one of my very first dates I was invited for Sunday Dinner with the family of this guy. We went to 10am Mass, the only one available in the town and stopped for our traditional donuts after and meandered on home after a leisurely Sunday Drive in the country to find a hungry and irate guy waiting to pick me up for his family's traditional 11:00am Sunday Dinner. Good thing I was in my Sunday best!
By the way, it didn't work out. That family and mine didn't speak the same language at all. His mom told me to bring her something from under the Zinc one day and I couldn't find it in the medicine cabinet because it was under the kitchen Sink, not the Zinc.  But the thing is, she really did say Zinc and insisted that the Sink was made out of Zinc even though she used Stainless Steel Polish on it.
P.S. I now know that Zincs can be made of Sinks, I mean Sinks can be made of Zincs  and I have a sudden urge to make a simple Battery after all this talk of Zinc, Steel and Copper Sinks!
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Kathryn UK
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doris wrote:
Kathryn UK wrote:
Oh, dear! That's me firmly slapped down the social scale ... we have breakfast, lunch and tea. That Yorkshire mother of mine! |
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Oh dear -- no offence meant! I did wonder as I wrote it whether other Brits would be sufficiently north of Watford to regard 'tea' as the norm |
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None taken . Have you ever heard American expats on the subject of the confusions they have suffered when they (or their children) have been invited for tea by the natives?
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Alice R
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kingvozzo wrote:
| Midday meal is lunch. Our last meal is supper or dinner--used inter-changeably. I grew up in NYC... |
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Me too!
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ALmom
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Ok, lunch is the midday meal - unless it is Sunday brunch. The evening meal at our house - probably use dinner more often now (my dh, I think always used dinner. He is from DC). But growing up we used supper for the evening meal more often - unless it was a more formal Sunday or feastday dinner, although both were interchangeable. I don't know if it had to do with where we lived or not - we traveled quite a bit until our 7 years on Kwajalein. My parents are Southern through and through (their NJ neighbors kept asking my mom to re-read things just to hear her accent) though I was born in NJ and lived most of my life overseas. I am now living in AL which is also where I graduated from high school. However, we are in a part of AL that has very few native Alabamians.
Janet
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chicken lady
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We just graze OK we have lunch and dinner, I always think of "supper" as a southern slang!
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Mama Moon
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I just saw this and thought I might just as well add to the confusion.
I was brought up partly in the South of England and went to boarding school in the South East which used the same name calling as I did at home.
Mid-day: lunch
Late afternoon - tea (afternoon tea as opposed to morning tea or coffee today - which could be about 10:30)
Evening:
supper = when informal (usual school evening meal, lighter meal before (or even after) going out to theatre or opera, etc
dinner = formal meal e.g.when ever we invite people over, let's go out to dinner, etc. (of course we are not talking about McDonalds...)
Interesting note - in French diner (dinner) is also used for the formal meal (as in dining - to dine). But the equivalent souper (c.f. supper) was a light meal especially a soup when going out in the evenings.
I have been told (someone might come and correct me now) that in the past in the UK poorer people did not have tea and supper/dinner so they had just one earlier meal - a bigger "tea". This sounds a logical reason why these different terms are used and it is more a socail thing than regional (although of course each region will have its more prominent social class.
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JenniferS
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Dh and I both grew up in southeast Kansas, and we still live there/here. I grew up calling midday meal lunch and evening meal dinner. Dh grew up calling midday meal lunch and evening meal supper. It drives him nuts that I say dinner. And Sunday meals at his mom's house are called "Sunday Supper."
Jen
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4Real Forums : Tea and Conversation
Topic: Dinner or Supper?
