Dialect quiz

[liv]

Because these are always fun, and because my quad keeps getting confused about the names of meals...

Poll #17620 what do you call what you eat?

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 85

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I usually call the main meal in the middle of the day:

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lunch
80 (95.2%)

dinner
4 (4.8%)

something else
0 (0.0%)

My middle of the day meal is usually:

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Before 11 am
2 (2.4%)

11 am to noon
3 (3.6%)

noon to 1 pm
35 (41.7%)

1 to 2 pm
36 (42.9%)

After 2 pm
9 (10.7%)

Not on a regular schedule / whenever I get time
25 (29.8%)

Skipped / I don't have time to eat in the middle of the day
5 (6.0%)

A substantial meal, eg cooked with multiple courses
3 (3.6%)

A light meal, eg sandwiches
46 (54.8%)

The main meal of the day
5 (6.0%)

Eaten sitting at a table
17 (20.2%)

Eaten at my desk or on the go
40 (47.6%)

Something else which I will explain in comments
4 (4.8%)

I usually call the main evening meal:

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tea
9 (10.7%)

dinner
77 (91.7%)

supper
17 (20.2%)

something else
2 (2.4%)

My evening meal is usually:

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Before 5 pm
0 (0.0%)

5 to 7 pm
11 (13.1%)

6 to 8 pm
39 (46.4%)

7 to 9 pm
39 (46.4%)

After 9 pm
9 (10.7%)

Not on a regular schedule / whenever I get time
13 (15.5%)

Skipped / I don't have time to eat in the evening
0 (0.0%)

A substantial meal, eg cooked with multiple courses
31 (36.9%)

A light meal, eg sandwiches
5 (6.0%)

The main meal of the day
51 (60.7%)

Eaten sitting at a table
36 (42.9%)

Eaten at my desk or on the go
6 (7.1%)

SEWIWEIC
3 (3.6%)

I regularly use the following terms for smaller or extra meals:

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brunch
38 (48.7%)

elevenses
17 (21.8%)

coffee
22 (28.2%)

snack
70 (89.7%)

tea
21 (26.9%)

brillig
2 (2.6%)

supper
11 (14.1%)

something not listed
7 (9.0%)

I usually eat extra meals:

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Between my morning meal and my midday meal
18 (22.5%)

Between my midday meal and the end of the working day
27 (33.8%)

Between getting home from work and my main evening meal
11 (13.8%)

Between my main evening meal and going to bed
12 (15.0%)

In the middle of the night
5 (6.2%)

Rarely or never - I eat strictly three meals per day
10 (12.5%)

Not at set times, I just eat something whenever I feel like it or have the opportunity
36 (45.0%)

SEWIWEIC
4 (5.0%)

My main association for the word 'tea' is: (pick at most three!)

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drink
83 (97.6%)

break during the working day
12 (14.1%)

hot drink and a slice of cake
16 (18.8%)

small meal in the afternoon / early evening
20 (23.5%)

main evening meal
12 (14.1%)

evening meal for children
5 (5.9%)

treat involving hot drink and scones or cakes in a homey or rustic setting
28 (32.9%)

fancy indulgence involving sandwiches, cake and wine in a grand setting
14 (16.5%)

something else
1 (1.2%)

I am:

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A native speaker of English
76 (90.5%)

A second-language speaker of English
5 (6.0%)

It's complicated
3 (3.6%)

My English language culture comes from:

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Ticky

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Tickybox
53 (79.1%)

I don't fit into your tick boxes
14 (20.9%)

Tea related catastrophe ate my great-aunt, you insensitive clod
13 (19.4%)

I have some other complaint about this poll
6 (9.0%)

Comments

[lilacsigil]

I say "Breakfast, lunch and tea" but my partner says "Breakfast, lunch and dinner" so I interchangeably use those terms. But left to my own devices, the former. When I explain to someone how to take their medication, I never use lunch, dinner or tea because those terms mean different things to different people! Breakfast seems pretty clear, though.

[liv]

That's a really good point about medication instructions! I think breakfast can be slightly controversial, because some people have a small snack on waking up and then a larger cooked meal after a few hours, either of which could be called breakfast. Whereas others have one more substantial meal first thing, and a later meal is called brunch or something else. And occasionally people use breakfast in its more literal sense, eg a wedding breakfast or the evening meal after a day-long fast. But I think there's less chance of people getting opposite meanings from what's intended than with tea or dinner.

[vatine]

I normally only have two meals per day (somehow, I can't really do the whole "eat just after waking up", so leaving an hour or so between "wake up" and "first grub" normally translates to "skip", now that I no longer have breakfast available at work), so I guess technically my noon lunch is actually brunch.

I could muse on how the "direct overputting" (itself a straight word component by word component translation of what it actually is, a 'direktöversättning') of the Swedish for breakfast would end up completely and utterly mangled, but instead I shall just self-referentially muse on the act of translating badly.

[liv]

That makes sense. I didn't ask about breakfast because I was more interested in tea (and the poll was already long), but there certainly are different cultures around it.

You're absolutely right that frukost sounds strange to English-speaking learners of Swedish. I do love making silly translations by breaking up compound words into unreasonably small chunks.

[naath]

*I call the thing with tea and sandwich and cake and (maybe) champagne "afternoon tea" and the feeding-children-early because we-are-doing-grown-up-dinner "high tea" (and unfair). I wouldn't usually call a *meal* tea, but I might have tea the drink and a snack and call that tea or a "tea break". Usually if I say "tea" unmodified I mean the drink (hot, the cold kind is "iced tea").

*In the 16th century we do breakfast, dinner, and supper (that order). No tea, because no *tea* (in rural Suffolk).

[naath]

Random history fact... dinner (for posh people) was at noonish and got gradually later and later and they had to introduce nuncheon to fill the gap.

If you (some generic posh you) habitually use "dinner" to mean really fancy food in lots of removes/courses, then I think you might do lunch/supper on days when you aren't entertaining company and want less formal eating.

[emperor]

My Mum's from Blackpool, so I've certainly heard of "tea" for the evening meal (I think Mum may still use it thus), but I generally use "breakfast/lunch/dinner" for the 3 meals of the day; but I try and be explicit when I say "dinner", because I know plenty of people who use it for the midday meal (and there have been a few Fails when this mismatch wasn't detected).

I think I would tend to say "afternoon tea" for the posher end of tea+cake+sandwiches as afternoon meal/snack.

[liv]

I am actually surprised how heavily weighted my poll has come out towards dinner rather than tea, I was expecting a much more even distribution. I think a lot of my friends use the posh / southern forms anyway even if that's not what they grew up with.

I do try to avoid Fails by specifying times and sometimes how much food is involved when I invite people to food-based social things.

[rmc28]

My children have school dinner or nursery lunch. I have lunch: usually reheated leftovers at my desk, but once a week is something lovely from the streetfood vans, bought and usually eaten with spouse. If I am having an indulgent week, another one or two lunches may be burritos from a different van.

Children get tea at nursery / after-school club on weekdays, or foursies at weekends / on holiday. Adults sometimes get foursies too, but this usually means a lighter supper to follow.

I say dinner for the evening meal in general, but my spouse says supper, so I have begun to say supper when I am talking about sitting down to eat the evening meal with him and the children, which we do almost every day.

At weekends I usually get up and have breakfast with the children, and my spouse gets up and cooks a more substantial brunch/lunch (depending on whether it falls before or after noon, afaict) a few hours later.

My mother and stepfather prefer to eat their main meal in the middle of the day, which I think she calls lunch and he calls dinner. When we holidayed with them at the end of May, and when we make shorter visits to them, we follow the same schedule.

More recently I have started making semi-frozen smoothie and having it for breakfast at my desk after arriving at work, because that's easier than making time for a sit-down meal while getting myself and both children ready to go out in the morning. (They always eat breakfast, but usually while I have a shower and get dressed.)

[adrian_turtle]

I have never heard the word "foursies" used for a meal, but am adopting it at once. (I was about to say I had never heard it, but I used it frequently when I played jacks.)

[worlds_of_smoke]

I have to eat more than 3 meals a day for medical reasons. I tend to eat 5-6 and/or nibble throughout the day.

[rysmiel]

I usually have a sandwiches-scale-meal a couple of hours after I wake up, which I will call breakfast if it is around 1000 and lunch if it is around 1300 and on my current schedule is unpredictably either, and dinner around seven or eight hours after. Though left entirely to my own devices I can easily become a one-meal-a-day python, in which case I have no specific name for the meal in question.

[ambyr]

Dinner is either something I pack and eat at work, in which case it's eaten around 4; something I eat at a restaurant with other people, in which case it's eaten around 7; or something I eat after I get home from work, in which case it's eaten around 9. If I eat dinner at 4 I usually have a snack around 10.

[watersword]

I have almost infinite associations with the word "tea", depending on context:

• my favorite drink


• a self-soothing ritual


• the largest meal provided by the administration at the classical music festival I volunteer at in Cornwall, UK, usually consisting of a casserole + tiny sides + dessert/pudding


• after-school/work snack, usually milky tea + fruit/granola bar/baked good


• treat involving hot drink and scones or cakes in a homey or rustic setting (cream tea)


• fancy indulgence involving sandwiches, cake and wine in a grand setting (high tea)

....and possibly others.

[(Anonymous)]

Hmmm, you have that meaning for high tea too? I thought it was my husband not understanding English people. To me, high tea is a big but not posh meal, pies and chunky sandwiches and maybe soup, probably chunky fruit loaf, and the posh tea as you describe is afternoon tea (but I probably won't drink wine with it).

[randomling]

Dinner (evening meal) for my family is eaten around 8pm, consists of a cooked first course and usually a cold pudding of some kind (yoghurt and fruit feature heavily), but eaten in front of the TV, not at table. The dinner table is strictly reserved for Posh Meals, which in our house is these days restricted to Christmas.

[(Anonymous)]

I think the only thing we get confused about now as a quad is afternoon tea, no? As in ,is it a small snack, maybe a slice of cake and a cup of tea, or is it the whole triangular sandwiches and scones shebang. And after that was a cause of upset and confusion right at the beginning, it hasn't been a problem, because we've been careful to clarify.

AFM, I've almost always had much posher partners than me, so my natural inclination to have breakfast, dinner and tea has turned into 'breakfast, lunch and tea' but I can't shake the need to call whichever is the hot meal dinner. This did cause a problem recently, where I thought I'd invited a partner to dinner at 1ish and they thought they'd been invited to dinner at 6ish, so made other daytime plans, but again, we're pretty good at clarifying.

[naath]

I think "afternoon tea" covers everything from "tea and a or scone" to "tea and cake and scone and pattisseries and sandwiches and champagne, as served at the swankiest of hotels"... it's a very confusing label which requires a lot of context. Were I to invite people to "afternoon tea" *at my house* I'd probably provide tea, cake (of some kind) and light food... but I'd probably not, it's an "out" thing, and way too much faff.

[ceb]

I was brought up with breakfast, dinner, and tea, but somewhere along the line I have changed to breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I think probably because I lived in college for several years and if you go somewhere to eat evening meal that someone else has cooked then it's dinner, not tea, as in "dinner party". And then lunch has to become lunch because otherwise it's massively confusing.

Tea with scones/sandwiches/cake/&c. is "afternoon tea" if you have it in a tea shop/rustic wossname and "high tea" if you have it somewhere grand like a posh hotel (I don't think I've ever had high tea).

[emperor]

t is often a boolean True value, also ;)

[cjwatson]

I don't think this is quite explained by the available answers in the poll, but I would tend to use "dinner" to identify the main substantial/cooked meal of the day regardless of when that is. It so happens that that's usually in the evening so I've answered as breakfast/lunch/dinner, but on a day when we have the main meal in the middle of the day then I'd call it breakfast/dinner/tea.

[sfred]

Oh, snap.

[sfred]

My domestic partner and I will often have "bread and jam for afternoon tea", stated as explicitly as that, at weekends when there is freshly-baked bread.

As a teenager I routinely had supper (toast and peanut butter, or something of that magnitude) immediately before bedtime, because tea (main meal) was at 5:30 or 6pm and that meant going to sleep hungry.

I have got into the habit of calling main-evening-meal "dinner" to be understood by my mostly-posher-than-me friends, but I have never called that meal "supper", and I hear that as a thing that people very, very much posher than me do.

Strictly speaking, I think dinner is the main meal, whenever that is eaten, so I might have my dinner for lunch (more often at weekends) or I might have my dinner for tea.

[redbird]

I call the snack/small meal between breakfast and lunch "second breakfast." ("Elevenses" isn't my dialect, and feels like it ought to be eaten later than I am generally having it.)

[forestofglory]

In my culture brunch is not an extra meal. It is a large late morning meal that replaces both breakfast and lunch. Brunch is a bit of a special occasion and is a meal one goes out for or invites friends over to not a normal family meal.

My sweetie is diabetic so we generally eat four meals a day: breakfast, lunch, tea, and dinner. Dinner eaten around 7 pm is the main meal in that someone cooks for everyone and everyone in the household eats together. However we don't have multiple courses on a regular basis though we might have serval dishes.

Lunch and tea are both on the small side and tea is often though not always something sweet.

[azurelunatic]

+1 brunch.

[conuly]

Brunch is not an extra meal, exactly. Brunch is what you eat when you sleep in on a weekend. It's a large breakfast or lunch and then you don't have the other meal, you only have two meals that day.

[green_knight]

That's how I know the term, too.

[sfred]

Oh, and timing: left to my own devices, I would have lunch between 12 and 1:30, and tea between 6 and 7:30. However, my workplace has a strong culture of 1pm-2pm lunch break, so I'm more likely to start eating at 1:10pm, and [(sometimes swimming +) commuting + time to cook] usually means I'm not actually eating my tea until 7:30 at the earliest.

I get irrationally sad if I don't have breakfast within about an hour of waking up, and I can't remember the last time I slept past 8:30am, so I rarely have brunch in the late breakfast/early lunch combination sense.

[green_knight]

My default used to be breakfast (as soon as I got up), lunch (around 1-2, main meal), and something light in the evening. However, work schedules mean that it's rarely convenient to eat a hot meal in the middle of the day, so I switched to have my main meal in the evening. In recent months, I've had to adapt different breakfast habits that mean I now eat a meal that feels more substantial (because it's cooked) and later (because it's more effort to rouse myself to actually prepare it. High activation energy).

This means that my midday meal usually is a snack, because I find two hot meals a day a stretch, and three is just too much.

[antisoppist]

Brought up on a farm with breakfast, elevenses, lunch (main cooked meal of the day), tea (bread and butter and cake at about 4 or 5), and supper (bacon & eggs or soup at about 9 at night after the work is done). But as children we'd have a beans on toast kind of tea at about 6 during the week, and would not have supper. Since my grandmother died, the afternoon tea has turned into people coming in and grabbing a slice of cake rather than sitting down at a table with china teacups. When we visit as adults now, someone tends to produce a proper evening meal at about 7 but my father will always require his cooked supper before bed.

In my own house the kids have a hot lunch at school, which is called "school dinner" and the main family meal is at about 6 or 7. I call that tea or sometimes dinner.

[alexseanchai]

I only answered the last four questions because I have some other complaint about this poll. To wit: if you'd asked what my folks call these meals and etc, I could have answered. Since you asked what I—somebody who works the four to midnight shift—call them, I find it an insoluble puzzle! XD

[siderea]

HA! Just posted about the same thing.

[highlyeccentric]

I have a problem with your meal descriptions! Both my dinners and lunches tend to be cooked *single course* meals, rather than either sandwiches or a multi-course meal. Lunch is frequently leftover dinner. (Sandwiches or wraps if I'm buying it, but if bringing packed lunch, it's leftovers.)

[shehasathree]

Largely the same. When I was growing up dinner (in the evening) was the main shared meal of the day and we almost always had desert afterwards (usually fruitsalad but occasionally something fancier if it was a special occasion). Desert was either directly after dinner or sometimes an hour or two later, depending on everyone's preferences at the time.

I can't/don't eat bread these days, so I don't have sandwiches, and neither lunch nor dinner are ever multi-course meals at our place (although they sometimes are when we visit our parents or friends' houses). But unless I'm talking to one of my briends who comes from an Asian culture who also tend not to eat bread, I'd tend to assume that lunch is a sandwiches-type meal, unless I'm specificlaly given reason to assume otherwise.

[siderea]

I think I'm breaking your poll a bit, in that I think you're asking about what is customary in our language cultures? My usage is not representative of my language culture. My regular schedule is very unconventional, and as such, my usage follows. It strikes people in my language culture as odd, and heck feels a bit weird to me.

I'm physically in -0400, but I'm habitually functioning in -0800. So, by local time, my schedule has me eating "breakfast" around 11:30am, then "lunch" around 4 or 5pm, and "dinner" around 10pm. I tend to have "snacks" at 2 or 3pm, at 7 or 8pm, and 1 or 2am.

And that 1 or 2am snack invariably (in the literal sense) involves a cup of herbal tisane that is substantially chamomile, or as I think of it – and if my hard-core C. sinensis snob mother heard this she would die just so she could start spinning in her grave – "herbal tea".

[slashmarks]

My timing is horribly off because I tend to sleep between four am and midnight *and* eat three meals a day, so it often ends up being noon to one, four to five, and nine to ten with an optional snack later, but effectively I eat the later two meals whenever I hit a stopping point in work or get hungry, so I answered 'not on a schedule.'

When I was growing up, lunch was whenever school scheduled it (usually ten or eleven AM) during the week and on the weekend whenever I got hungry, and family dinner was usually eight to nine pm. I usually had a meal sized snack when I got home from school since otherwise I might not eat for ten hours.

Regarding the main meal of the day, it's either lunch or dinner, but which depends on when I have time and energy for cooking. The other will be lighter in proportion with how heavy the main meal is. (Eg. I might eat hot pasta twice in one day, but if I have meat stir fry or steak or something I'll probably eat bread and cheese for the other meal.)