Breakfast - Dinner - Supper

Charles ate his dinner at noon.

Here is why I love AI: “Your husband is wrong, and the historical record is squarely on your side. The Indiana pattern — a big midday dinner, and a lighter evening supper — is the older, more traditional arrangement.”

I knew it! I feel so vindicated.

So, for centuries, the biggest meal of the day was around noon and it was called dinner. This was when families dined together and consumed the most calories, so that the labor-intnsive agricultural work could get done. By evening, the family was exhausted and tired and so they would have a simple meal of soup (souper —> supper) and leftovers from the earlier meal.

Industrialization changed this eating pattern. Once people started working in factories and offices, their main family meal slid to the evening hours and the mid-day meal become smaller. Wealthy urbanites started dining at 8pm.

Rural farmers and agricultural workers, by comparison - couldn’t wait until 8pm to consume major calories. Which is why in my family, “dinner” always referred to the biggest meal of the day, not necessarily the evening meal. A perfect example of this was Sunday Dinner at Grandma Record’s which was always a noon meal.

So agricultural and working-class communities often retained:

breakfast → dinner → supper

while urban/middle- and upper-class usage increasingly became:

breakfast → lunch → dinner

Today the terminology largely depends on social class, occupation and region.