Other forms: lunches
Lunch is the meal eaten in the middle of the day. Have lunch, a working lunch, out to lunch.
In much of northern England and Scotland the midday meal is called dinner and lunch is a southern word, which is one of the sharper regional markers in British English. Lunch break, lunch hour and packed lunch are standard. Note there is no such thing as a free lunch, the economists' proverb; out to lunch, which informally means not paying attention at all; and do lunch, which is a joke about business meetings.
1nounlunchThe meal eaten in the middle of the day.
“Lunch is about twenty minutes and eaten at the desk.”
Patternhave / eat / skip lunch · lunch break · out to lunch · a packed / working lunch
lunch is a meal.
LUNCH → rhymes with PUNCH: out the door at twelve
It rhymes with punch: at twelve o'clock the whole office stands up at once and runs out for lunch.
hooks ontopunch
Lunch is a shortening of luncheon, which is of uncertain origin — possibly from a word for a thick piece or hunk of bread. It was an afternoon snack before it became a meal, which is why dinner had to move.
Middle English
nonechenche — light midday meal
English, today
lunch
Built from
Recorded since 1580 in the sense “piece, hunk”. The word luncheon with the same meaning is presumably an extension on the pattern of puncheon (“cask”) and truncheon (“cudgel”). But earliest found forms of luncheon include lunshin and lunching, which are equivalent to lunch + -ing, with the suffix -ing possibly later modified to imitate a French origin. In contrast, the more common sense “light meal” is first attested for luncheon in 1652 and for lunch in 1829, so in this sense the latter is probably a shortening of the former. Lunch is possibly a derivative of lump (as hunch is from hump. See hunch for more), or represents an alteration of nuncheon, from Middle English nonechenche (“light midday meal”) (see nuncheon) and altered by northern English dialect lunch (“hunk of bread or cheese”) (1590), which perhaps is from lump or from Spanish lonja (“a slice”) literally “loin”.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA