How Do You Call Your Evening Meal?
I remember my English teacher back in Argentina referring to the evening meal as “supper” or “dinner”, so you can imagine my surprise on my first week in UK when I was invited for “tea” at a colleague’s house at 6:30pm and found out that tea wasn’t actually tea but dinner!
You have to imagine that at that point, I was learning how to properly pronounce the word “scone”, let alone that there are a number of topics that divide England when brought up in conversation and one of the main ones is how best to describe or call the last meal of the day.
Dinner, Tea or Supper?
Fortunately, YouGov carried out a survey of 42,000 people from across the country and our own data analysis solved the debate on what UK’s evening meal is called.
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Across England as a whole, the majority (57%) call it “dinner”, while just over a third (36%) opt for “tea”. The remainder either call it something else (including 5% who say “supper”) or answered “don’t know”.
As may be expected, “dinner” was the overwhelmingly preferred term used in the South, while those in the North preferred to say “tea”.
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Where you come from is how you call it!
What you call the evening meal reveals a lot about where you come from – and maybe even where you’re headed, so I asked on Twitter how each one of you call the evening meal and the conversation got started right away!
It is fascinating how, in some families they use both, dinner and tea but then again, it all comes down where you come from.
If you are like me, from a non English-speaking country and are invited for “tea”, make sure you first check on the map where that person comes from so you avoid bringing scones for “tea” instead of a bottle of wine for “dinner” !
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">How do you call your evening meal? 🍽️</p>— Pablo Gomez (@PabloLGomez) <a href="https://twitter.com/PabloLGomez/status/1009677343642869760?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 21, 2018</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
