Dinner or Supper – Question #62
ByWhat happens when you tell your dad that you’ll be traveling home for a visit and will be there in time for dinner?
Well, in my case…he would expect my family to show up around noon. But in reality, we wouldn’t show up until 6ish. Oops.
This has certainly been a problem before. I have learned to be very specific about what I mean when I say ”dinner” to my dad who lives in Kansas.
I grew up calling the noon meal dinner and the evening meal supper. When I got married and moved to Nebraska, it seemed that most people called the noon meal lunch and the evening meal dinner. Therefore I defied the loving teaching I had been raised with my entire first 21 years of life and converted to become an evening time dinner eater. Why, I haven’t eaten supper in years. Oh, except for the last time I went to Kansas. I suppose then I had supper several nights in a row.
Maybe it’s a family thing. Maybe it’s regional. But what I want to know today is…
When do you eat dinner? Lunchtime or evening time? Ever showed up to someone’s house for dinner at the wrong part of the day?!
that dinner word is too confusing
I say breakfast, lunch and supper too, never dinner.
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Stephanie Broersma Reply:
March 27th, 2010 at 11:27 am
Me too!
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I grew up in WY and it was breakfast, lunch and supper with dinner being somewhat interchangeable with supper. Dinner could also mean a more formal meal…like Christmas dinner. We never called it Christmas supper. Funny post, Laura. Thanks.
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A Texan born and raised, we say Breakfast, Lunch and Supper. Dinner is a large noon-ish (more like 1:00 in my house) meal, usually on special occasions, Sundays or Holidays.
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I Live in IA and we say dinner or lunch for the noon meal and supper for the evening meal. However after my daughter went to college she started saying dinner for the supper meal making things confusing for us as well.
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Dinner is the evening meal, unless it’s Sunday, and then it’s the noon meal. Confusing, I know!
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breakfast, lunch and dinner here in Arizona. (but I might say supper :)
I was wondering about soda. I grew up calling it “pop”. Nowadays I call it soda.
However if we went to someone’s house for a party (or had a party) we referred to all soda as a coke. Do you want a coke? and then asked what kind. funny huh?
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elizabeth Reply:
March 27th, 2010 at 7:36 pm
Ha ha we do that at our house too, with the Coke. All soda is Coke. :)
I am in south FL, btw.
Laura, we call it breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Never supper.
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Fun question! I was born & raised in Colorado, and we’ve always said Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner. My grandparents called it “Supper” although they were from the mid-west originally.
To further confuse things, when I lived in New Zealand, they called the evening meal “Tea”!! It took me a long time to finally figure out that “tea” meant dinner!!
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My husband and I were just having a similar conversation about who defines dinner as the noon meal or night time meal. I grew up eating dinner at night, but found others to eat dinner at lunch time. I learned years ago that saying lunch and supper take away the risk of a problem. Glad I’m not the only one who calls it different things.
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I guess I use dinner and supper interchangably. I grew up eating dinner at noon (from Ohio) and since our family was always milking cows at “suppertime” we never sat down together to eat supper. Now I always refer to the noon meal as lunch to eliminate confusion.
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Colorado…breakfast, lunch and dinner. When my parents, from NY, come to dinner and ask about “supper” my three children laugh at them.
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I do hope that the ladies who are being somewhat derogatory in their remarks about the word “supper” being so “weird” will keep in mind that using the word “dinner” for the evening meal sounds funny to some of us!! I was born and raised in the south, and am still here, and we have only ever used breakfast, dinner and supper. Lunch was what we ate when we were at school, but it was dinner at home!!
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Laura Reply:
March 27th, 2010 at 2:04 pm
I was thinking the same thing (and cringing when I read some of the comments)! Normal to you is normal to you…everything else shouldn’t be WEIRD, just different!
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I was raised in the south small little town in central Florida and we always said dinner was defined as the biggest meal of the day, which in my family was lunchtime. I now say breakfast, lunch and dinner sometimes supper. Around my house now supper is our biggest meal so that makes it dinner.
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I think this is a regional thing, but also becoming a generational thing. I live in the SE and we were taught to say dinner and supper, but it seems that younger people now say lunch and supper.
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I thought it was a “country” thing. I’ve lived in Nebraska almost my whole life. On the farm, we had breakfast, dinner, and supper. My city-boy husband always had breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Deanna in Florida’s definition is what I’ve always heard also. (Although if you pay attention to all those weight-loss “experts”, we probably should still be having dinner at noon and supper in the evening!)
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Hmm, interesting. I am in VA and grew up with Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner. That being said, I live in a location now where there are a lot of imports from other parts of the country (near DC). Somehow I didn’t notice it but I’ve been dropping the word “dinner” altogether, and saying Breakfast, Lunch and Supper. Funny how I hadn’t noticed it until now.
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I have the opposite regional experience. I grew up in Missouri (6 blocks from Kansas) calling the evening meal dinner. My husband’s family in Nebraska calls the noon meal dinner! I’m very careful about making plans when we’re visiting our families. We may make dinner (noon) plans with his family, then drive the three hours to make our dinner (evening) plans with my family!
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In my family my mom is Southern, dinner was at 6pm Monday through Saturday night. Sundays after church, Daddy was a preacher, we had dinner at 12 noon and supper at 6pm. Boy, were we in trouble if we called it supper any other night of the week. So my children all call it dinner except Sunday night to this day. It was very confusing to my husband.
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Okay this is just too funny…My husband is from South Carolina and his mother loves to tell me that I am “citified” and I’m “citifying” her grandbabies…Well she was coming up to visit us in Pennsylvania and said she would be there by dinner time. So I got out a huge roast and was going to make a huge elaborate dinner. She showed up at 11am!!! So yeah, I say dinner for the evening meal. I never say supper and they all do the whole dinner=lunchtime and supper=evening meal. Good to know I’m not the only one this has happened to….^_^
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So, in Oklahoma, on the farm, it was usually breakfast, dinner, and supper for us. Unless it was wheat harvest time, which necessitated the change to breakfast, dinner (served to the crew at the house at noon), lunch about 4pm (served to the crew in the field), and supper at home (about dark-thirty) for just the family. Did Mom and I cook all day? Yes we did.
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Going back and reading all the comments now, it seems that it is more of a family thing than a regional thing. It’s all in how you’re raised. :o)
Oh, and here in TX, we too call all sodas “Coke”. haha. I have family that hails from Minnesota and it cracks them up every time we ask what kind of coke they want.
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Too funny! I grew up a couple years in TX, we have always said breakfast, lunch & supper. My hubby grew up in KS, but his folks are from NE. They live about 5 miles from them in KS now, and I still have to clarify which meal it is if they invite us for ‘dinner’!
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A Michigander here and we call the meals breakfast, lunch and dinner. We really don’t do supper, though I know what it means. We used to summer over at our cottage in Canada and dinner was definiately the noon-time meal and supper was a lighter meal served in the evening.
Oh, and I read a few comments about what everyone calls a soft drink. Michiganders call it pop. I am originally from NY and I stubbornly still call coke, pepsi, sprite, the fizzy, carbonated high fructose water, soda. If you ask for a soda here in Michigan, they think you mean an ice cream soda. If you ask for pop in NY, they think you mean someone’s dad. Go figure!
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I think that should be the next question: what do you call your carbonated beverage? Soda, pop, or otherwise?
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I grew up in Iowa with the noon meal being considered Dinner and the evening meal Supper. Then I move to California and no one ever heard of Dinner at noon so the evening meal Dinner.
Later I lived in Florida where my husband was in the Navy. Our first Thanksgiving he invited all the guys that couldn’t go home for the holiday to our small mobile home. It was my first experience with turkey & pumpkin pie etc. We had invited them for Dinner which to us then meant the evening meal. One of the guys from Wisconsin showed up at noon for Dinner. My husband who had had night duty slept most of the day while this guy had a sandwich and watched sports on the t.v. while I nervously prepared Thanksgiving “Dinner” . It went fine and we really did enjoy being able to share a meal with a bunch of guys who would have had to eat in the mess hall. The guys were truly appreciative. I still look back at that day and wonder how I pulled it off. I think God must been whispering in my ear as I cooked that meal as my cooking skills were pretty minimal as a young bride.
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Having grown up in Wisconsin on a farm we were a breakfast, dinner and supper family. After marrying a man raised in the city, it is now breakfast, lunch and dinner. It drives him crazy when my mother would invite us over for dinner and mean a noon meal. She now asks us to come over for a noon dinner or a 5pm supper to avoid any confusion!
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Monday through Saturday it is Lunch and Dinner. On Sundays it is Dinner and Supper. I have no idea why.
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My husband and I were both raised with dinner being at noon and supper being in the evening. What I find extremely interesting is that we are both from Nebraska (I was raised in Northwest Iowa though), and we now live in Nebraska as well. In fact, not far from you – which I find interesting when you look at the variety of terminology people use just within a small area. Even in our surrounding area, and within our relationships with people at work or church, you find such a wide variety of they way people use words.
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We eat breakfast, lunch, and supper. We use the term dinner to refer to a large meal. It can be scheduled at any time and often (though not always) implies that we will be having guests. For example, we usually have our Thanksgiving Dinner at around 12:30 pm. Christmas Dinner is often at around 6 pm.
Regarding soft drinks: Here in the south, it’s all called Coke. If we tell you we’ll bring a few bottles of coke to the picnic, we might bring Coca-Cola, but it is more likely that we will bring root beer, Pepsi, orange soda, sprite, and any other flavor of coke we think people will like. It might even include sweet tea and bottled water.
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My grandparents from central Pennsylvania use dinner and supper, but I was raised in almost the same area (2 hours away) and learned lunch and dinner…crazy isn’t it?
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I live in Illinois and I call the noon meal lunch and the evening meal dinner BUT many people here I know call the noon meal lunch and the evening meal supper, so I think it’s more of a “family” thing…not necessarily a regional thing. Others I know call the evening meal supper ecept on Sunday, the evening meal is called Sunday Dinner.
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