Back in the day you had dinner in the afternoon, and supper in the evening.
Now you have dinner in the evening, and who even invited this lunch guy?
When did this change happen? Is there a reason for it?
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Dinner and supper being different things is a regional thing. Lots of people use those words interchangeably in different parts of the country. Lots of people don’t use the term “supper” at all. Your confusion on this is likely very specific to where you live.
In general, dinner is the big meal of the day. Even today, if you’re a farmer it’s probably around noon.
If you eat dinner around noon (or 1, or 2), then in the evening you’ll have a smaller meal called (in the US) supper. At least in novels (which are at least somewhat related to real life), in Britain it’s tea. There may be a supper later.
If you eat dinner in the evening, there will be lunch earlier. Usually around noon. And maybe supper after, depending on how late dinner is.
Even if dinner is mostly in the evening, Sunday dinner may be around noon. In that case, Sunday could be the only day of the week that you eat supper. Holidays tend to be like Sundays in that respect.
I think this is largely regional, so I’ll preface this by saying I’m from the south of the UK.
I was always told that a small cold meal in the middle of the day like a sandwich was lunch, whilst a larger hot meal in the middle of the day was a dinner. And then tea is the name for the evening meal.
So if you have a Sunday roast at 1:00pm that’s a dinner. If you have a sandwich at 1:00pm that’s a lunch, if you’re at school and you get Shepard’s Pie or something then that’s a dinner. When you go home and have spaghetti or something like that at 6:00pm that’s tea.
I’ve never heard anyone use ‘supper’ before but if I heard it I would assume it means the same as tea.
The way that I’ve always heard it is that breakfast is the first meal of the day (aka breaking your fast), and dinner is the biggest meal of the day, regardless of when it is. A smaller meal before dinner would be lunch, and a smaller meal after dinner would be supper.
This is just a regional thing. There has never been a time when it was “breakfast, dinner, supper,” that has just suddenly switched to “breakfast, lunch, dinner.”
Back in the before times workers worked. From shift start to end of shift. After a while they started complaining. Eventually Congress got involved and declared the workday must include a rest period halfway through. “Lunch”
Where I’m from, dinner is the largest meal of the day and supper is the last meal of the day. These may or may not be the same meal. “Dinner” may be eaten around noon.
Regionalism. Grew up in New England USA. Midday meal was lunch, and evening meal was dinner. Didn’t come across the word “supper” until I moved to the Midwest USA as a teenager and there it is used interchangeably with dinner.
Short answer: the amalgamation of “modern” French and English as well as a shift in eating habits, [particularly in North America](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supper) led to the change in phraseology around the start of the 20th century.
Longer answer: “Le diner” means “to eat” in French. Supper comes from “souper” meaning “to eat” various forms of French outside France, particularly in places with English presence (like Canada or Belgium).
Dinner *used to* refer to the main meal of the day, lunch. This is because dinner/lunch fueled the grueling labor of fieldhands and industrial production. Your later meal was lighter, usually just to hold you over till breakfast.
Different parts of the world refer to lunch/dinner and dinner/supper differently, but this can generally be broken down into Anglo versus French backgrounds. I grew up in the Midwest near French colonial towns — lunch was lunch, dinner was dinner.
In the south (where I now live), dinner and supper are used interchangeably. When I did my study abroad, the north of England called your later meal “tea” but understood when I, a Yankee, asked people to go to dinner.
This, of course, has nothing to do with actual *amount* of food consumed at all these various meals. Tea was usually a large affair for me and my Northern English chums (to say nothing of that sweet, sweet Full English brekkist), but my college friends and I generally ate more at lunchtime because we were studying late into the night.
In any case etymology suggests the shift happened in the 20th century as mass communication began, just before WWII.
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