Why do some people call the evening meal ‘tea’?
Posted by Sinemetu9@reddit | AskUK | View on Reddit | 14 comments
I call it ‘dinner’, or with my family, ‘supper’, which I suppose are both from French, and I’m in London, so is it a geographical north/south thing? But why ‘tea’? It seems confusing, when tea is traditionally at 4. Edit: Put ‘dinner’ twice, changed one to ‘supper’.
Extreme-Database-695@reddit
From Lancashire and although I use the word lunch now, there was some inverted snobbery over it when I was a teenager, given that it comes from luncheon and that sounds posh to me. At school, dinner time was noon and you ate it in the dinner hall. The evening meal was tea.
It seems to have evolved from the lower classes and upper classes diverging on meal names. While language is a democracy and no opinion holds more weight than the other, it does often seem the way that the default opinion is that the working class are always wrong.
Responsible_Peach474@reddit
thats odd because growing up i always thought dinner was more formal than lunch (and also meant tea), and ive always called it breakfast,lunch and tea.
yalkeryli@reddit
Well most importantly it seems nobody here's heard about second breakfast.
Sinemetu9@reddit (OP)
Is that different from brunch?
yalkeryli@reddit
Usually between Breakfast and Elevenses, but I'm sure we can push luncheon forward to fit brunch in...
Sinemetu9@reddit (OP)
Elevenses is liquid, it doesn’t count.
TheNamesDave@reddit
It comes in pints?! I'm getting one of those!
Sinemetu9@reddit (OP)
Are you West Country?
nicknockrr@reddit
Breakfast, dinner, tea. Just always been the way
Sinemetu9@reddit (OP)
Ah right? Didn’t know the midday meal was called dinner.
t_treesap@reddit
Just want to throw out some some further detail on midday meals being called dinner:
By historical definition dinner is the largest meal of the day, while supper is the evening meal. (Apparently the larger meal shifted to later in the day a few hundred years ago.)
t_treesap@reddit
Just want to throw out some some further detail on midday meals being called dinner:
By historical definition dinner is the largest meal of the day, while supper is the evening meal. (Apparently the larger meal shifted to later in the day a few hundred years ago.)
OneAbbreviations8070@reddit
Must be an north of England thing I've only know breakfast , lunch, dinner. Tea is what we drink.
Simmybong@reddit
north are true English,south are invaders of england,as northern we say breakfast,dinner,tea,,but upper class and middle class changed the name why south says it diffrent