Supper or dinner?

[HappyHen17]

My husband works for a very elite family and they refer to their evening meal as supper. We’ve always bickered at home between breakfast, lunch and dinner or breakfast, dinner and teas; so where does supper come in?! The only friends I know who use supper are people who have distanced themselves entirely from their roots and embraced their new found upper middle class status, they previously used one of the above three to distinguish meals. So AIBU to ask what decides if it’s tea, dinner or supper-is it class AIBU or location YANBU?

Breakfast,lunch ,tea as in 3pm and then supper if informal or dinner if formal .

Not British, but I say supper because that’s what I was taught it was, and what the English speakers around me called it. London. Not a clue as to where I sit in regards to the UK class system. My husband is upper-middle class American, and says dinner.

If we have guests I will invite them for supper or dinner and that sets expectations for the meal.
Same here. A supper invitation is definitely less formal, and smaller.

Who cares. With the cost of living I’ll be down to OMAD soon anyway!

but to answer your question, supper is a little lite snack before bed

We say breakfast, lunch, tea, supper!

I can't understand the class system and have never referred to myself as a particular class, it's bizarre to me. I say dinner though, usually and possibly supper if a lighter meal served later.

I’d agree.

Tea is also an afternoon thing between lunch and the evening meal.

I agree with @ComtesseDeSpair but then I am from the Continent

"The only friends I know who use supper are people who have distanced themselves entirely from their roots and embraced their new found upper middle class status"

Same. Only person I know who says 'supper' is my working-class-origin-story school friend who went to Cambridge and now says supper in an attempt to fit in with her upper class colleagues. She also pretends she went to public school for the same reason.

Given that her misplaced, internalised shame is the only experience I have of the word being used to describe an evening meal I really dislike it.

The evening meal is tea. Supper is something like crumpets and milk before bed.
Anything else is wrong 😁

I say breakfast lunch and tea. Would only say dinner if I was going to a dinner party. Supper is toast before bed.
For over a year my ds claimed he didn't get any lunch at nursery. Turns out they were calling it dinner.

North west lower middle class.background, now living in south east and a slightly more upper middle class circle. I never say supper really but if I did it would refer to toast before bed whereas I have friends who refer to it as their general evening meal at home (which always strikeca slightly cringey David Cameron kitchen supper tone to my ear but I realise iabu) I would use dinner for my evening meal usually, which tends to be served around 7-8pm but I often refer to "kids' tea" because their meal is at 5pm and not in all honesty dinner (egg and soldiers/fish and chips/pizza etc).

Breakfast

Lunch (if light)/dinner

Tea (if light)/dinner

Supper (piece of toast/biscuit)

Breakfast - morning meal
Lunch - midday meal
Tea - evening meal
Supper - cereal or toast before bed

Yep! That sounds very familiar! They also call their lounge ’the snug’! I love them
dearly but do cringe at some of the new found ways of describing things. Worse since they began working at a private school, yet ironically they are staunch Labour voters and anti-aristocracy….it’s very bizarre!

People saying dinner is the hot evening meal, how does that work then when you get dinner ladies at school for the midday meal?! 😕😁
Dinner's what you're eating at dinner time (midday) soup or sandwiches or your jacket spud or whatever

Breakfast - lunch - tea (as in cup of tea and a biscuit) supper (evening meal). Agree with PP that if I'm inviting friends for supper as opposed to dinner, it means less formal.

That's a fair point. School dinners has always been an exception: to distinguish a hot meal from a packed lunch. Outside of school it's always lunch at midday

Breakfast
lunch
tea/dinner- evening meal
supper-toast and cup of tea before bed
(middle class, Scotland)

Supper is what you eat late evening if your dinner/tea didn't fill you up. And the next morning mum gets mad at whoever ate today's lunch for last night's supper 😂

They aren't called dinner ladies anymore. They are called lunch time supervisors as they supervise you eating your lunch.

Dinner is 7 / 8 for us, supper would be later and lighter.

They aren't called dinner ladies anymore. They are called lunch time supervisors as they supervise you eating your lunch
Ohhh pffft they're still dinner ladies in my head lol I'm old 😁

I'm from the Southern US, and "supper" means a less formal evening meal. It's especially used when dinner is eaten in the daytime, for example Thanksgiving and Christmas. So if we have Thanksgiving dinner at 2 pm (our usual time), we would have supper (usually turkey sandwiches) around 7-8 pm or so. But some people use the terms interchangeably for the evening meal, although "supper" definitely has a more informal connotation. Also there is no class connotation to the word in the US.

I'm working class from the south.
Breakfast
Lunch
Dinner

My husband is middle class from the south.
Same as above but he will say 'supper' for a light snack past 9pm.

I now live in the North and there is no dinner in the evening here, it's your 'tea'.