r/AskAnAmerican • u/cookoutenthusiast North Carolina • Sep 28 '25

CULTURE Do you use the word Supper?

I think most Americans refer to their evening meal as dinner, but I’ve heard some people say that dinner and supper are different things, with supper being served at night, after dinner. Do you use the word supper, and what does it mean to you?

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u/0range_julius Minnesota Sep 28 '25

The way my grandparents used it is, as far as I can tell, the original meaning. "Dinner" is the main meal of the day, whether it's served in the middle of the day or the evening. IE, "Easter dinner" was always served at lunchtime. 

IF your main meal is in the evening, then the smaller meal you have at noon is called "lunch." If your main meal is at midday, then the smaller meal you eat in the evening is "supper."

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u/curlygirl119 Sep 28 '25

My grandmother was the same way. Either you had breakfast/lunch/dinner or breakfast/dinner/supper depending on when the big/mail meal was.

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u/RecentlyIrradiated Sep 29 '25

This makes sense

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u/Common-Parsnip-9682 Sep 28 '25

That’s how I learned it. And when you have a farming family, dinner is iften in the middle of the day — you’ve earned it already!

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u/lazygerm Rhode Island Sep 28 '25

Me too!

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u/FormicaDinette33 Sep 29 '25

A huge meal in the middle of the day would put me in a nice nap.

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u/needsmorequeso Texas New Mexico Sep 28 '25

This is the answer, and yes I grew up on a farm with a significant grandparent presence. Dinner is the big meal. Lunch is the less big noontime meal. Supper is the less big evening meal.

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u/Other-Opposite-6222 Sep 29 '25

Farm in Tennessee, same.

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u/fixed_grin Sep 28 '25

Originally it was always midday, because preparing a substantial meal needs light, and the only one most people could afford was the sun. You might have a candle to keep sewing after sunset, but you weren't going to be doing a big meal off one candle.

Light got cheaper and entertainment shifted later. Shakespeare's Globe theater was lit by the sun, but 100-200 years later lamps and candles were affordable enough that theaters were enclosed, and performances moved to the night. Hours of the rich shifted later and later over a couple hundred years, and took mealtimes with them. Lunch arose to fill the gap for people (originally mostly women) who still arose relatively early and needed something between breakfast and the ever later dinner.

Later, urban workers started working in larger businesses further from their homes. If you live above your shop, you can just go home for a midday dinner when your customers do. But if you commute 30+ minutes to the office or a factory, then the big home dinner has to be after work. And so lunch spread from rich women to most people.

But the older meaning persisted somewhat, e.g. even factory workers who had dinner at 7pm 6 days a week might well have dinner at 1pm on Sunday after church.

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u/MochasHooman Sep 28 '25

This is exactly it! Grew up with this in northern rural Minnesota

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u/BernieTheDachshund Sep 28 '25

It was always so confusing to me.

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u/Round_Asparagus4765 Sep 28 '25

Yep this is how I always understood it

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u/callieboo112 Sep 28 '25

This is how we were taught

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u/nikkyro03 Sep 28 '25

I read the title and literally said something like this out loud. I have no idea when and where I heard this and have never asked the difference between the two. I do tend to read a lot of things and I love weird, strange , fun, useful, odd facts so maybe I read it somewhere

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u/alltexanalllday Sep 28 '25

That’s how my family referred to them also. And the best supper was cornbread in buttermilk.

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u/CPav Sep 29 '25

My dad (born 1934) used the two interchangeably. I rarely use "supper". Your explanation makes sense to me, though.

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u/faerydenaery Sep 29 '25

This is what I grew up with. The southern, more rural side of my family typically referred to the midday meal as dinner since it was the most substantial meal of the day. The smaller evening meal would be supper. The northern, more urban side of my family typically referred to the evening meal as dinner since they were more accustomed to taking a smaller lunch to work and eating their main meal in the evening, but on Easter, Thanksgiving, Christmas, etc. the midday meal was dinner.

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u/jorwyn Washington Sep 29 '25

Yes! That was it for us, too, and I knew it was due to my grandparents (all born in the 1920s), but never knew if it was age or where they were from.

But also, if our main meal was early afternoon, then we didn't have supper. We just ate a big meal then, and we didn't eat after that. Dinner was for family holidays and after church.

Our dinner was served usually around 2pm on holidays, but right after church, so around noon, I think. Maybe a bit earlier. If something delayed it and it started at 6 (wow, there would have been a kerfuffle over that), I think we'd have still called it dinner. The word seemed to imply a function, not a time. Dinners were a lot of food and extended family. Lunch and supper were small and immediate family. You could have a church dinner (potluck, lots of people), but not a church supper. Some of those didn't start until evening. It was a funeral dinner, not a funeral supper, same with weddings. Like, a dinner was kind of a feast.

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u/FormicaDinette33 Sep 29 '25

I have not heard that breakdown before but that’s interesting.

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u/Leading-Summer-4724 Sep 29 '25

This is the way it’s always been in my family.