Other forms: dining, dined, dines
To dine is to eat dinner, especially formally. Dine out, dining room, dine with friends.
The verb is formal or slightly playful; people say have dinner. Dine out means to eat at a restaurant, and dine out on a story means to get invitations by telling it for years. Dining room, dining table and dining car are all standard. Note diner, which in American English is a kind of cheap restaurant; and that dine and dinner are the same word, one a verb and one the meal.
1verbdineTo eat dinner, especially formally.
“We dined at a smart restaurant overlooking the harbour.”
dine is an eating.
Old French disner comes from a Latin phrase meaning to break the fast — the same origin as dinner. The word has slid from breakfast to lunch to the evening meal over about a thousand years without ever stopping.
Latin
ieiūnus
Vulgar Latin
*disiūnō — to eat breakfast
Old French
disner — to dine, eat the main meal of the day
Middle English
dynen
English, today
dine
Built from
From Middle English dynen, from Old French disner (“to dine, eat the main meal of the day”), from Vulgar Latin disiūnō (“to eat breakfast”), from disieiūnāre (“to break the fast”), from Latin -, from dis- + iēiūnō (“to fast”), from Latin ieiūnus.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA