IBC

Okay guys, I've had this conversation with JP I know 40 times, and I'm in the midst of having it with Jake so I figured I'd see what y'all have to say.

What do you call the midday meal, lunch or dinner?

What do you call the meal you eat in the evening, dinner or supper?

Breakfast in the morning.
Lunch midday.
Dinner at night.

Lunch is what you eat during the middle of the day.....you can call dinner, supper or vice versa. There is nothing wrong with that.

Lunch is midday

Supper is in the evening

Dinner is the nice meal after Church on Sundays, or going out to eat at a restaurant.

LOL

A nice meal after church on Sundays would probably have to be brunch

Pirates wrote:A nice meal after church on Sundays would probably have to be brunch

We've always called it Sunday Dinner, probably because we don't really have an official supper in the evening on Sundays.

Does that make any sense?? LOL

Growing up, supper was always a special occasion type of meal, like The Last Supper. Lunch was midday and Dinner was in the evening. We didn't have many suppers.

It's totally regional! I learned that in '82 when I lived in Knoxville, TN.

Midday meals are lunch; evening meals are supper when informal, dinner when not-so-informal.

I'd like to hear what Kelly and Ropers say, but I never hear "supper" up here in the Northwest.

Breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Jag's right. We NW folks get confused when we hear the word "supper".

I never hear it called supper here, either, but I can see it being called it. The term annoys me though.

Here its interchangable and mostly depends on where your family is originally from, because a lot of southern Indiana are transplanted Southerners. With that being the case with my family, the midday meal is dinner and the evening meal is supper

dictionary.com is right:

dinner: 1. the main meal of the day, eaten in the evening or at midday.

supper: 1. the evening meal, often the principal meal of the day.
2. any light evening meal, esp. one taken late in the evening:

If you eat half a pizza when you wake up, is that dinner/supper?

Depends on when you wake up. I mean if its before 11 I'd classify it as breakfast

Rockies wrote:If you eat half a pizza when you wake up, is that dinner/supper?

I'd suppose it would depend on how much you drank the previous night and what time you woke up.

From personal experience, it would be lunch.

Isn't dinner the midday meal in England? We're breakfast, lunch, and dinner pretty assertively in northern California.

lunch is a midday meal, Dinner and supper are evening/final means of the day. In England, Dinner is an evening meal. Dinner is certainly not a midday meal.

like I told aaron, lunch is midday meal, not dinner except in maybe the 2% of america that he lives in.

It is definately Breakfast -Lunch-Dinner here in the NW.

As others have said it is as much regional, but even more so I think it is generational. The older generations from the south that I know call the mid-day meal Dinner and the evening meal Supper. I believe they come from a generation where the mid-day meal was much more formal than it probably is today.

Just my 2 cents.

Ropers is dead on. When I was little my grandparents watched me while my mom worked, so when we ate at 11, it was dinner. I don't believe the mid-day meal was more formal back then Ropers, but there was more to it because you'd come in from the fields for like an hour to rest and eat a big meal to get you through the rest of the day's work on the farm

I think we may be thinking different definitions when I referred to the mid-day meal being more "formal" in the past. I wasn't really meaning, "black tie" formal but more of a big production/event everyone get together and sit down formal, whereas today, lunch is something many people eat on the run, whenever they can get to it.

Another food related regional dialect oddity to me is how Coca Cola/Pepsi/Dr Pepper/carbonated beverages in general are referred to. In Texas we call them soft drinks (I guess as opposed to hard drinks). In certain other regions I think they're referred to as sodas, soda pops, and even "pop". I've always teased my mom, who's from Colorado, for calling it pop, and I got a kick out of seeing an isle in a Denver grocery store actually labeled as "Pops".

I call it a soft drink as well Brett. A lot of people around here refer to anything as a Coke