What's The Difference Between Dinner And Supper?

Ask 10 Southerners the difference between "dinner" and "supper" and you'll get 10 different answers. Some folks feel that dinner is more formal, while supper is more social, but it turns out there's a little more to it than that.

What Does the Dictionary Say?

First, let's pull out the trusty dictionary and define both terms. Merriam-Webster establishes dinner as "the principal meal of the day." Supper, on the other hand, has three definitions:

1. The evening meal when dinner is taken at mid-day.
2. A light meal served late in the evening.
3. An evening social especially for raising funds. (think: a church supper or social supper).

In other words, what we refer to as the lunch hour today was actually reserved for dinner. Whereas supper, traditionally speaking, was thought of as a light meal following dinner.

Dinner Vs. Supper: Generational Differences

But language is an ever-evolving concept, and dictionaries are merely a snapshot of a language at a particular time. If you grew up in the South, chances are your attachment to either "supper" or "dinner" has more to do with who cooked for you, rather than the time of day you sat down to eat.

For example, you probably heard, "supper's ready," just before your Mama or Grandmama placed a tableful of delicious dishes before you. Because back then, families would sit down together to enjoy supper—not dinner—whether it was at noon or 6 o'clock in the evening.

Today, particularly among the younger generation, not so much. Now you're more likely to hear people ask, "what's for dinner?"

Historical Evolution of Dinner and Supper

Beyond regional and age differences, we can also trace the meaning of both words back to the early days of America. Between 1600 and 1776, the South relied heavily on agriculture and farming. Many farmers were too busy to eat three meals a day, and most often just ate breakfast and dinner, with the latter serving as the biggest feast of the day.

The English Language & Usage Stack Exchange, a forum for linguistic enthusiasts, suggests that farmers "ate larger meals at noontime to give them the strength to keep working through the afternoon." If they were still hungry once they returned home from working on the farm all day, they would eat a light supper in the form of soup.

This makes perfect sense when you think of the Merriam-Webster definition of supper and its root word. Supper stems from the word "sup," and it's also related to the German word for soup ("suppe").

According to the English Language & Usage Stack Exchange, families would put on a pot of soup to simmer throughout the day and eat it later in the evening, which was also known as "supping" the hot soup.

According To Historians...

Food historian Helen Zoe Veit seemed to echo that same sentiment in an interview with NPR, where she discussed how many meals Americans actually consumed in the 18th and early 19th centuries.

According to Zoe Veit, this trend started to change when "more Americans were working outside of the home and farm, so they couldn't readily return home to cook and eat in the middle of the day." This could explain why, in recent times, the word dinner for young working professionals is referred to as the last meal of the day, and lunch is, well, the new version of supper—only eaten earlier in the day.

So which word did you use in your household growing up? We're big fans of the word "supper" for the last big meal of the day, but if "dinner" is how you know it, who are we—or the dictionary—to tell you what to call your meal? As long as you enjoy good food with the folks you love, it doesn't really matter what you call it.