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dinner

UK/ˈdɪnə/US/ˈdɪnɚ/
nounA12 meaningsOne of the most common words in English · #231 of 15,258leans spoken

Other forms: dinners

Dinner is the main meal of the day. Have dinner, dinner is ready, out for dinner.

Which meal it is depends on the speaker: in much of southern England dinner is the evening meal and lunch is the midday one, while across northern England and Scotland dinner is midday and tea is the evening. School dinners are always at midday. Dinner party, dinner jacket, dinner service and Christmas dinner are the fixed compounds. Note that this is one of the sharpest class and regional markers in British English.

Ɱ · CC BY-SA 3.0

Definitions of dinner

  1. 1noundinnerThe main meal of the day.A1~46%

    “Dinner was at six and nobody was ever late for it.”

    • Said"We're having dinner at eight, if you'd like to come."
    • WrittenSunday dinners at her grandmother's ran for three hours and ended in an argument about cards.
    • UsedBook a table for dinner; at weekends the place fills by seven.
    • ContrastDinner, not lunch. Lunch is the middle of the day; dinner is the big one, usually in the evening. lunch →
    • Not thisA sandwich at your desk is not dinner. Dinner is the meal you sit down for.
    • Exchange"What's for dinner?""Whatever's left in the fridge. Chicken, probably."

    Patternhave / cook / make dinner · dinner at + time · out to dinner · a dinner party · dinner is ready

    synonyms: supper, tea

  2. 2nouneventA formal evening meal or event.B1~54%

    “The company holds a formal dinner every December to thank its staff.”

Shares are an estimate: a language model read 26 sentences found in the wild and placed 24 of them on a sense (2 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.

dinner is a meal.

Also accepted in games: supper

Remember it

DINNER → whoever cooks it is the WINNER

Whoever cooks dinner is the winner: at eight o'clock everyone comes to the table and says so.

hooks ontowinner

Where it comes from

Old French disner meant to break the fast — the same idea as breakfast, from Latin dis- plus jejunare, to fast. Dinner was the first meal of the day, and it has been sliding later ever since.

  1. Proto-Indo-European

    *h₁yaǵ-

  2. Latin

    dis-

  3. Vulgar Latin

    *disiūnō

  4. Old French

    disner — lunch”, but originally “breakfast

  5. Middle English

    dyner

  6. English, today

    dinner

Built from

  • iēiūnō · Latin — to break the fast

From Middle English dyner, from Old French disner (“lunch”, but originally “breakfast”), (modern French dîner), from Vulgar Latin disiūnō from Latin dis- + iēiūnō (“to break the fast”).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in In the Kitchen

Practise this word

dinner in the wild

  • The first dinner jacket is traditionally traced to 1865 on the then Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII.

    Black tie

  • Thus in many non-English languages, a dinner jacket is still known as the false friend "smoking".

    Black tie

  • A Sunday roast or roast dinner is a British dish traditionally eaten on Sunday.

    Sunday roast

  • Other names for this meal include Sunday lunch, Sunday dinner, roast dinner and full roast.

    Sunday roast

  • The term TV dinner, which has become common, was first used as part of a brand of packaged meals developed in 1953 by the company C.A.

    Frozen meal

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

From Project Gutenberg, public domain. These sentences are from real books, shown to illustrate the word at work.

Related words

the disner family

dinner

dinner — used about once every 16 pages · #231 · point at the bar for the others

  • roast dinner