My sister has started calling her evening meal supper ...

[TheFateofOphelia]

She was talking about having friends round for "supper" on Friday. I was puzzled as she knows, and I know, that supper is a piece of toast if you're feeling peckish at bedtime.

Apparently, now she's moved to Surrey she no longer has her dinner between 12 and 1, she has lunch. Now I'm ok with that but AIBU to draw the line at her having supper at tea time?

Has she got an electric Aga and a faux flagstone floor with underfloor heating? I'm a really horrible person

However sometimes it’s just easier to use the language everyone understands.

i live somewhere that dinner is never at lunch time. Therefore someone moving here would confuse everyone if they talked about dinner but meant a meal mid day.

they are only words - but they have different meanings in different areas and within different social sets.

I don’t think referring to the evening meal as supper as posh. It’s just very English and old fashioned (I’m not from England)

But your sister can't invite her friends for tea, because they would expect scones and little tiny snippets.

Tea more or less stopped being tea in our house when the afterschool famishment abated. When dcs became round about 14 and all food became something-to-eat/nothing-to-eat/when-are-we-eating/I've-decided-to-just-graze.

No Aga but will only now buy Miele appliances.🙄
Flagstones most definitely.👍

I married from away so it's now breakfast, lunch, dinner, but my heart knows it's breakfast, dinner, tea. My Yorkshire grandparents always ate it that way too. Lunch (dinner) was meat and two veg, dinner (tea) was bread, cheese, cold meat, pickles, salad.

My MIL started calling her evening meal supper a couple of years ago. She didn't move and she doesn't live in Surrey.

The main meal of the day was always called tea until she suddenly changed it.

I find it annoying and weird. Who wakes up one day and decides they will start calling it supper after 60 years of calling it tea?

The most annoying thing was she started asking me what I was having for my supper, like it was the most normal thing in the world to change its name.

Breakfast, lunch, teatime and supper is a drink and a snack before bed. However when I was a child we raised in Breakfast, lunch and the evening meal was supper. Though my dad would bring us a jam sandwich wrapped in greaseproof paper and a glass of milk as supper while he read our bedtime stories!

My thoughts exactly!

Just be yourself FFS.

I don't use the word supper and we didn't growing up in an aspirational working class/lower middle class family in the outer London suburbs (officially Surrey, but ex-Middlesex Surrey, which made a difference ) in the 70s. I associated it with being posh, by which I meant like Margot from The Good Life (also outer London suburbs, but felt a world away), or a Two Ronnies sketch of two posh men talking.

At the same time, I read The Beano, where they would use the Scottish meaning "and chips" and talk about fish supper or haggis supper.

Then, when I was an adult, my middle-class Yorkshire in-laws used it to mean "cup of tea and two biscuits just before bed", which I hadn't heard before.

And then, in the 90s/00s, I remember Tony Blair (or was it David Cameron?) talking about a "kitchen supper" which I think means "an informal dinner party, held in your massive kitchen without getting the best china out."

So many class and regional distinctions about a simple word. How very British! I think it's too simple to say it's "posh" or "Northern" or "Scottish". It's all at once

I was born in Surrey but don't live there now but still live in the South. It used to be that dinner was the main meal of the day whether it was midday or in the evening. For me now dinner is 3 courses, in the evening, and what I would eat at a restaurant or when entertaining, supper is our evening meal at home. The midday meal on Sunday might be called Sunday Dinner. Tea has always been a drink, or with cake at about 4pm, but at boarding school we had 'high tea' which was a substantial meal at about 6pm. That might have been because the headmistress was Scottish. I really don't think it is very important what you call meals.

Tea for me lol!
But I have been 'corrected' in the past in public and now those people aren't my friends lol. Call it what you want, don't try to embarass someone who doesn't call it the same

Exactly like my friend. 🙄

It honestly causes my insides to twist. Just so unnatural for her. ☹️

Each to their own. Regional differences are a thing.
Growing up with my black country mum, it was breakfast, dinner and tea.
Then we moved house and it was breakfast, lunch and dinner!
As a result, I'm fairly interchangeable with the words, depending on audience and location!
Likely your sister is as well, if she's now living in a different place to where she was bought up. It's not that big of a deal.

Dinner is the main meal of the day, so if you dine at lunchtime that's your dinner. Supper is what you have when you just sup on something, i.e. have a small amount to eat before bed.

Tea is a cuppa.

Everyone I've ever known in or from Surrey has called dinner dinner, not supper (or tea, as tea is what you have at 4 pm, with scones etc.), but perhaps there are regional differences within Surrey.

Interesting thread. I'm not a native speaker, and at school we learned that the three meals of the day in English are breakfast, lunch and dinner. And tea is a liquid that Brits are supposed to be experts at (how shocked I was to find that British tea bags don't even have strings, once I moved to the UK).

That the women serving lunch at school are called 'dinner ladies' was indeed a bit confusing when I first heard about it, but then so was the whole concept of 'school lunch'. Where I come from schools have only started serving food very recently, and my generation lacks the whole experience of 'school food'. It was fascinating for me to hear people reminisce, with a grimace, about 'school spotted dick' and similar. School lunches are a great equalizer, like railway commutes.

I still don't understand the class vs. regional overtones of the different terms. Is it plebeian in some places to say 'lunch' not 'dinner' for the midday meal? Is it folksy, plebeian or merely Yorkshire-ish to call dinner tea?

But what if lunch is sandwiches etc, and dinner is the hot meal of the day? Would it still seem right to call them dinner and tea?

I feel like it relates to the type of meal. Hot, main meal = dinner. Sandwiches/soup/salad/cheeses and cold meats = lunch if in middle of day, tea if in the evening.

I grew up with breakfast, lunch, dinner, except Sundays which were breakfast, lunch, tea - because we had a roast in the middle of the day and sandwiches in the evening. Now I live where people say breakfast, dinner and tea. But it feels too wrong to call a sandwich at lunch "dinner"!

I wonder if the regional difference comes from the type of meal eaten at different times?

Hey! This is a Mumsnet discussion! Don't you come on here with your rational, non-judgmental answers!

Ah! a fan of Hyacinth Bucket?

It's all unimportant and interchangeable at the end of the day.
Old time public schoolboys reminisce about school dinners, not school luncheon. At the same time, one would say 'packed lunch', not 'packed dinner'.
Dad was from a vast Yorkshire mining family, they were raised on fish suppers, and not at bedtime.
Even brunch can go on till teatime these days 😀

When I was young our evening meal always supper, tea at 4'ish sandwiches and cake (sometimes), supper at 8'ish usually something with chips!

The lady of the house herself!
Rip and thank you Dame Patricia 🩷

What do you call it?

I had a pretty middle class upbringing. The midday meal was lunch (used once-upon-a-time to be called luncheon), the evening meal dinner, unless it was light and more informal in which case it was supper. I still use these, they make sense to me.

“Herefordshire/Wiltshire border village.

Do you mean Gloucestershire ? It’s a bit bigger than a village imo. 😁