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Dinner
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Dinner is a term with several meanings.
Around North America in general, dinner may be a synonym of supper – that is, a large evening meal. However, in parts of Canada and the United States, dinner can be a synonym of lunch, with the evening meal in turn called supper. For the most part these terms only persist in rural areas, particularly in the Southern United States and among older Americans.
In the United Kingdom, dinner traditionally meant the main meal of the day. Because of differences in custom as to when this meal was taken, dinner might mean the evening meal (typically in the higher social classes) or the midday meal (typically in lower social classes, who may describe their evening meal as tea). There is sometimes snobbery and reverse snobbery about which meaning is used. Large formal evening meals are invariably described as dinners (hence, also, the term dinner jacket which is a form of evening dress. However, ambiguity is often avoided altogether by using lunch for the midday meal and supper for the evening meal, neither of which can be misunderstood. School dinners is a British phrase for school lunches.
According to the American Heritage Dictionary, the word "dinner" referred to breakfast in Middle English.
A more formal definition of "dinner", especially outside North America, is any meal consisting of multiple courses. The minimum is usually two but there can be as many as seven. Possible courses are:
- Hors d'oeuvres (also known as appetizers, starters)
- Soup course
- Fish course
- Salad course
- Main course (also known as meat course)
- Dessert course (also known as the Sweet or pudding course)
- Cheese course
Some , alcoholic meal that lasted for anything up to 3 or 4 hours. After the meal proper, the men would stay at the table to smoke, chat, and drink, while the women would retire to a boudoir to talk, sew, and brew tea.
Then during the 18th century, dinner was served at a gradually later and later time until by the early 1800s, the normal time was between 7:00 and 8:30 pm and an extra meal called luncheon had been created to fill the midday gap.
Category: Meals
Other related archivesAmerican Heritage Dictionary, British, Canada, Cheese, Cuisine, Dessert, Fish, Hors d'oeuvres, Kitchens, Meals, Middle English, North America, Salad, Soup, Southern United States, United Kingdom, United States, boudoir, dinner jacket, evening dress, lunch, luncheon, meat, pudding, reverse snobbery, rural, snobbery, supper, tea
 Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Dinner", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki |
