Can you explain what supper is?

[beebee25]

I don't really understand what supper means.. is this a full meal or a snacky type thing? My boss puts she is meeting people for supper in her calendar. Is this dinner or am I missing the point?

Supper is crackers and cheese and maybe sliced pear, late at night when dinner was early or too small.

For some upper class people supper means dinner, but so does dinner, so a bit baffling.

Main evening meal for me. We have breakfast, lunch and supper. Scottish, middle class.

I'm not disputing that at all, I know it's completely normal up North. 😊
I think my initial shock just came from the fact that when you learn English in a foreign country, nobody teaches you the regional nuances.
As far as I knew, tea was a drink, not a meal, and that was that. 😁

To me, dinner and supper have always meant pretty much the same thing. I never realised that supper could sound just as odd to locals as tea does to me 😂

Depends who in the family is talking.... DH has breakfast, elevenses, dinner, afternoon snackage and supper

I have breakfast, lunch and dinner with random snacks if needed.

The kids have get out of bed something, dinner lunch and supper dinner.

Supper is a nice word though… it has connotations of post theatre meals

Whereas dinner has connotations of “school” and “dog’s”

Growing up there were two types of supper in our house. One was a handful of peanuts, half an apple and a glass of milk consumed by the children of the household an hour or so before bed and after bath. The other was a light meal organised and pre prepped by my mother with final organisation by my father and was a 'theatre supper' for choir or drama group post performance. Mum would be a shorter, less snooty Margot Leadbetter and getting up to see them all would be a great treat. This was my 70s/80s childhood.

Supper now might be a light meal after a concert or event. I wasn't posh growing up, but we didn't really say 'tea', we said 'evening meal'. We did have 'school dinner' or 'dinner time' at lunch time when I went home from the village school then back again. By the 80s 'dinner' was as obsolete as 'tea' in our not too far from London home. 'Supper' as a posh person's 'dinner' arrived as a concept for me at Oxbridge

Well don't you have a smart phone? Just download an ai, or old skool google it 😫

DH was going out early this evening so ate early at about 5.30pm. He's just got home and is currently in the kitchen making a sandwich so I'd call that supper.

Agree

Posh people call tea supper. To me supper is a small snack before bed, usually if we’ve had to have an early tea. It’s normally something like cheese and crackers.

breakfast 7am-8:30am
elevenses (freshly ground coffee and a patisserie) 11 O’clock
lunch after 13:00 hrs
tea (cucumber sandwiches, slice of cake and a cup of lapsang souchon or Earl Grey) between 16:00-17:00
supper (quite possibly three courses) after 19:00 hrs

Supper to us was the casual evening meal. Like what you’d have on a weekday. Dinner would be slightly more special. We never called it ‘tea’.

Living the dream

I do like dinner lunch and supper dinner! Might be a few syllables too many, but it's cute - and very clear in meaning.

Dinner is what I eat at dinner-time. School dinners were served by dinner ladies.
Tea is what you have after work but if it's a bit later it's supper.

Supper is crackers and cheese and maybe sliced pear, late at night when dinner was early or too small. This is baffling. Why would someone eat, especially a pear, late at night?

Way about Supper Dances were they a thing anywhere? I asked DH he hadn’t never heard of them.

Supper is what we call our evening meal. We’re definitely not posh, just pretentious!

For me as a kid in the 60s it was the food we ate before going to bed. We'd have a drink and a biccy before we went upstairs.

Breakfast
Dinner
Tea
Supper

Supper is before bed.

The people who say breakfast, Dinner then Tea what is a lunch to you? I am breakfast, lunch, dinner maybe supper before bed

It's a mildly pretentious-sounding activity, performed by Ladies Who Lunch. Usually announced by invitation to A Luncheon 😄

I see that tea isn't on your schedule, so presumably it represented a similarly rarefied event, with invitations to Afternoon Tea?

It's savoury for sure.

I think if it as the evening meal when the day's main meal was at lunchtime.

For example, growing up we had a Sunday gammon. Then tea (literal tea, sandwiches and cake). Dad wasn't into tea, never ate much then and generally went for a fishfinger sandwich around 8-9pm. That was supper.

interesting for sure; breakfast lunch and supper (which is a full evening meal) dinner is fancier multicourse/more sides/maybe appies/and dessert.
bedtime snack is exactly that a bedtime snack.

I see. Yes tea for us is just offered thought the day as putting the kettle on or yeah afternoon tea as an event

In my 60s Yorkshire childhood, supper was always a slice of toast or bread and butter (sometimes bread and dripping) an hour or so before bedtime. Breakfast was eaten half-asleep before I went to school, dinner was at dinnertime (between 12 noon and 2pm, anything later risked starvation according to my mother), and tea was at teatime, between 5 and 6pm. Timings were set in stone.

Lunch? Evening meal? Never heard of such nonsense. And calling a late cooked meal "supper" would have been viewed as laughably pretentious. It would probably have been regarded as an unwelcome Southern affectation, and not for us plain Northern folk.