I spent Monday through Wednesday working at a semiconductor fab in Regensburg. The midday meal in the staff canteen offered a huge range of options including 4 different hot meals. The majority of my German colleagues had three courses (if you count salad) and universally referred to the meal as lunch.

The same is true of large companies I work with here in the UK also.

If I suggest to a colleague that we have a dinner meeting, not a single one of them will ask me if I mean midday or evening. And they'll all turn up at the right time.


Elevenses are at 11am of course. I missed them out as I haven't heard the word used in quite a while - not since my kids were small in fact.

And brunch may have been posh once, but the world has moved on (well - most of it) and now it's just slang for a meal taken somewhere between breakfast and lunch.

I tend to agree. But then I wasn't the one who introduced Google into the debate.


The etymology of words used to describe meals and mealtimes is actually pretty interesting. But the discussion has been about what's in general use now.

This.

How Germans translate their words into English is utterly irrelevant.
You couldn't translate their very literal un-nuanced [umittagessen[/u and [iabendessen[/i into anything meaningful in English other than a literal, un-nuanced midday-food and evening-food.
Why are we talking about Germans? They know little about food anyway.
Except when it comes to Kaffee und Kuchen (*) ... then they are streets ahread.


(*) Which translates correctly as Coffee and Cake ... regardless of time of day, although late afternoon is best.

How could you possibly know that? Maybe it's a hobby of mine. Or perhaps I moonlight as a social historian.




Germans colloquially translate mittagessen as lunch because the majority of English speech they are exposed to equates lunch with midday and dinner with evening. Which was kinda what I was saying.

If you want to dig back far enough BTW, dinner was actually breakfast. It only moved to midday (and eventually evening) as people became soft enough to need three meals a day instead of two.

True, fair point, but let's remember that a dictionary records usage rather than defines it.
But then, the age of my dictionary rather fuxup my point there.

Try telling that to Germans.

And it's entirely relevant to my original contention as an example of a large region of the world that describes lunch and dinner in their correct sequence.


Literally nobody uses literal translations in everyday speech. Literally.


I like German food. What's not to like about lots of meat and dairy products with a liberal helping of fried potatoes? My arteries and waistline tend to disagree but I haven't listened to those spoilsports in years.

And you missed out the beer. Weissbeer and Dunkels are some of my favourite beers.

That irrefutable font, Wikipedia, says ... [iOriginally, dinner referred to the first meal of a two-meal day, a heavy meal occurring about noon, which broke the night's fast in the new day. The word is from the Old French (ca 1300) disner, meaning "breakfast", from the stem of Gallo-Romance desjunare ("to break one's fast"icon_wink.gif, from Latin dis- ("undo"icon_wink.gif + Late Latin ieiunare ("to fast"icon_wink.gif, from Latin ieiunus ("fasting, hungry"icon_wink.gif.[3[4 The Spanish word "desayuno", the Romanian "dejun", and the French "déjeuner" retain this etymology (such as Portuguese "desjejum", while referring to breakfast). Eventually, the term shifted to referring to the heavy main meal of the day, even if it had been preceded by a breakfast meal.[/i


... which mean it's breakfast anyway.


You know what, I'm leaning towards what someone posted earlier, i.e. it being the main meal, regardless of whether it's at dinnertime or teatime.
Which, of course, means that I must now exclude "lunchtime" from my vocab.
There ... it's gone.

You're going to miss a lot of meetings. And a fair number of meals.

I must admit that when I did German Literature at A-level being extremely surprised at the fact that anyone could get any sort of lyrical or nuanced qualities into literary works, but they do, although it's very different. But you've got to love the sheer practicality of German wordsmiths - don't invent a series of sounds, just knock some individual words together into compounds and that'll do. However blunt. Tell it like it is! Don't hold back! Why get clever? What's wrong with bustenhalter?

Meat? It ain't "meat", it's FLESH! (Fleisch)

Want a contraceptive? Just ask for a Schwangerschaftverhütungsmittel ("pregnancy prevention means"icon_wink.gif

And indeed the result is that they often do it better than other languages.
Which says more - Pollution? or Umweltverschmutzung ("environment filthying"icon_wink.gif. Even if you can't understand a word of German, you just know that's a Bad Thing, right?

And on occasions, we just admit we can't beat them, and adopt their creation.
Schadenfreude, anyone?

And if you have a big breakfast and then sandwiches for the rest of the day does that mean you have dinner for breakfast?

What about a night-shift worker eating roast beef & Yorkshires at 06.30: is that breakfast, lunch, dinner or tea?

More pertinently, does it fooking matter?

Lived in various locations in and around London for 22 yrs now and it's generally accepted by those closest to me that its breakfast dinner and tea. If we go out in the evening we go out for a "meal". We often use the term Brunch at the weekend on lazy days. We have Sunday dinner for a roast meal. Or simply state we are having a "roast dinner".
That said my wife states its breakfast lunch and dinner. Though she gets stumped when I ask her who looks after the kids at school between 12pm and 1pm.
What we have to remember is that these sayings evolved in a different era when the working week was so very much different to what it is today.
But as Cody says who cares. The true English language is a evolving and fluid beast. That's its beauty. Yes it can be ised by Americans but equally the Australians and their shocking soaps have had an effect over the past 25 years and the list goes on.

Look, you eat your dinner at dinner time and your tea at tea time and anyone who tells you otherwise is a bleeding poof!

Daily running order is thus....

Yer Breakfast
Yer 10 o'clock
Yer Dinner
Yer 3 o'clock
Yer Tea
Yer Supper

Its the law.

Blimey, when you're on the scales and you look down, can you see the scales anymore ?

I'm just big boned......

No, I'm not, even though it would be a desirable state of affairs

In the Navy we had

0700 : scran
1200 : scran
1700 : scran
2100 : nine 'o' clockers

From Oldham, living in St Helens, Head of yr 8 in Oldham secondary.

The midday break is called lunchtime or dinnertime or both in one sentence. "im in detention at dinner miss so can I eat my lunch in your office?" Or I'm having a hot dinner at lunch today"

The evening meal is always, always tea though.

At Mintball Mansions, the small, midday meal is lunch. Because it's a small, midday meal.

Dinner is the main meal of the day. In the evening. At dinnertime.

So there.

What do you feed Wigan_Fan down in the cellar?

Omelettes made with fried, left-over duck skin.

Think them Nigerians must have had him for dinner.
He's been M.I.A for a long time.

Oh, he's still out there.

He's simply not here, for reasons that were very clear at the time.

A shame, because he brought a much-needed intelligent right/right of centre voice, but there you go.

Most people use eggs