My daughter's school in Leeds (pronounced lids) has a paradoxical system of 'lunch-buddies' to help the little monkeys eat the gruel, overseen by 'Dinner-ladies'.

How do you work that out? The literal translation is pretty much midday meal and evening meal.

That only partly works for me.
Dinner may well have been the word for the main meal regardless of what time of day it was taken but I reckon usage has drifted since then.
Lunch has drifted into meaning the midday meal in some geographical areas, even where they mean a proper sit-down thing with cutlery and everything.
I'm sticking with dinner at or around midday and tea in early evening, regardless of size or content.

For some classes, supper is in the evening, like dinner, but is informal.
I guess my tea would be supper to them and dinner to some others.

Thanks to my daughter's swimming training we now have our tea at around 7:30-7:45pm! If we call it dinner, does that make us posh?

Yes. Even my rudimentary German is capable of a literal translation of those two words. However Google Translate, which we were talking about at that point, translates them to lunch and dinner respectively. As does every German I have ever spoken to.

Yeah, and we fought two massive wars to stop them imposing their ways on us. That's what it was all about, right?

I thought it was all about that bloke Archie Duke who shot an ostrich because he was hungry. Or was that only the first one?

I'm sorry Kosh ... but the terms suggested by a piece of American software or what Germans think is the right word in English are hardly what we'd term definitive.

My (admittedly old ) Shorter OED has "Dinner" as "The chief meal of the day, eaten originally, and still by the majority of people, about the middle of the day (cf. Ger. [iMittagessen[/i), but now, by the professional and fashionable classes, usually in the evening; particularly a formally arranged meal of various courses, a repast given publicly in honour of soemone, or to celebrate some event".

If only German students of English would use the OED instead of Langenscheidts, eh ?

But no it doesn't! I'm reasonably fluent in German, but wouldn't really need to be to understand that "lunch" is NOT a literal translation of "mittagessen" - a literal translation would be "mid-day eating" or "mid-day food". Therefore if you choose to "translate" that as "dinner", or "lunch", you are adding precisely nothing to the argument as simply your choice of which English word to use is, obviously, the one you use. It's a purely circular argument. If I translated "mittagessen" from German then it woudl depend on what type-of mid-day eating I had in mind.


In my experience posher people tend to use "lunch" but I am certain that very few adults that work standard hours have their main meal at dinnertime (sorry, mid-day) and so referring to it as "lunch" is both reasonable, and a more accurate description than dinner.

Whereas for a schoolchild having a hot 2 course meal, a "school dinner" is a much better description, as crisps, an apple and a fruit juice in a box would be a "packed lunch", and not at all a "packed dinner", even if at exactly the same time of day.


Interesting, but totally irrelevant, as someone once said. Unless you can explain why your personal experience has greater validity?

Hang on hang on hang on, you have NEVER quizzed every German you have ever spoken to on how they personally translate those words, so stop fibbing! Why on earth would you ever have done such a bizarre thing?

I do find though that practically all Germans I have spoken to who've learned English as opposed to American, have been polluted by posh southern jessy English anyway, so it's hardly a surprise if their efforts amount to trying to talk a bit posh, even though it can be very funny listening to their efforts to pronounce their "u"s as "a"s.

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.

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.