to be pissed off with people who refer to their evening meal...

[Einsteinnolonger]

as 'Dinner' and not 'Tea'.

Tea is a cup of tea and piece of cake at about 4pm. Absolutely nothing else is tea.

Lunch is betweek 12 - 2

Dinner is the evening meal. The kids have supper if their friends come over after school for fishfingers Have never heard of supper as something you eat before you go to bed.

Dinner's the evening meal. Never tea. Afternoon tea is cakes, scones and sandwiches mid afternoon and high tea is when old people on day trips have fish and chips in a restaurant at about 5pm.

My mum has taken to calling her Dinner, Supper

FGS mother you are from Finsbury Park!!!

My father used to call it his evening repast

Definately dinner here. Edinburgh

why does it 'piss you off' what people call it??? you must get annoyed very easily!

Mrs de verre please define geographical areas (with post codes ) in which it is acceptable to use the term supper

Food historian here:

Once upon a time, working people would get up, go to work, take the first break and then break their overnight fast with breakfast, usually mid/late morning. Hence 'wedding breakfasts' which are definitely not bacon and eggs at 8am. Austen's characters often do piano practice and have a walk before breakfast, which even by the C18 was no earlier than about 10am. 'Dinner' used to come next, for everyone, but over the course of the C19, aided by industrialisation, urbanisation and the tendency for working people to be out all day, 'dinner' drifted from early afternoon (2ish after your 10ish breakfast) to early evening, and then later evening. Posher people who didn't have to get up in the morning and didn't worry about how many candles they used, ate later. With breakfast at 10 and 'dinner' now at 8pm, you create a vacancy, filled by 'lunch' (which originally just meant a snack). But if you dine at 8pm and then stay up for another six hours at a ball, you will get hungry, and then you have 'supper' (from the French 'souper' because it was usually soup). 'Afternoon tea' came in with the increased import of tea in the early C19, and was always regarded as feminine though in fact men were usually present.

None of which explains why the British have turned all this into a game of social hierarchy.

Willacather what a fantastic thing to be would love to do that !

I'm with Nacy on this one. Tea is a drink.

Nacy? Nacy????? Nancy is what I meant.

Oooh Willa, are you the sort of person they have on those history programs cooking up something out of bits of a pig that the pig doesnt know its got? And making Tony Robinson sick on medieval recipes?! :o

I love finding out about that sort of thing, what a great job to have!

Love that history, WillaCather - very interesting!

For what it's worth, we do breakfast, lunch and dinner. Until we came to the UK, I've never heard anyone refer to a meal as "tea", so was a bit baffled at people having just a drink as their evening meal...

This has been done 3 times in my lifetime on MN

Sigh. She is from a particulary rough part of Norf London. Long before anyone wanted to live there.

N8 if you really want to know although I suspect you dont.

We have breakfast, lunch and tea but the main meal is dinner so it could be breakfast, dinner and tea or breakfast, lunch and dinner.

I (and most of my friends and family) call our evening meal supper.

I'm not posh... just Welsh.

If you you can call your lunch your dinner and your dinner your tea ....

then you have earned your irn bru and are know for sure that you are scottish

I'm the sort of person they have sitting off-set and saying 'but they didn't do it like that' and 'actually, corsets weren't laced tightly' and 'you do know no-one would have tried that in this weather' and they say 'yes, but it makes better TV like this.'

The timings and words for meals have been status-markers in Britain since about 1770. Exactly what means what changes every few decades, but the food-and-class games are constant.

I like the word dessert. Pudding makes me think of something spongy,covered in custard and my DC would be very disappointed if they thought they were getting pudding and it turned out that yoghurt was all that was on offer.

Supper makes me think of Jilly Cooper. To me it means a late night snack. Dinner is the evening meal, whether formal or informal.

Tea is a drink.

So you are there as the expert that they then ignore Willa? That must be frustrating! I take it you dont watch costume dramas much, or atleast not without yelling at the TV?! :o

breakfast, lunch and dinner

when i lived in yorkshire it was breakfast, dinner and tea, which confused me

YABU. Civilised people have dinner.

We have
Breakfast at 8am,
Dinner at noon,
TEA at 5.30pm
supper around 9ish when kids are asleep.
We don't like to share the extra special stuff :o

lunch
tea
dinner
supper, usually after the theatre.