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Podcast Transcript
We all eat every day. We use English words for the foods and meals we eat without even thinking about it.
But where did those words come from, and what did they originally mean? What is the difference between dinner and supper?
Were the modern distinctions we have between fruits and vegetables always there, and for that matter, was meat always meat?
Learn more about the origins of English words pertaining to food on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
All the words I will be covering in this episode are ones you are probably familiar with. However, the origin of these words, I’m guessing, will be quite surprising to many of you because, in some cases, they mean almost the exact opposite of what they mean today.
So, let’s start this dive into the origin of food-related words with the meals themselves: breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
The easiest of these is breakfast. Breakfast is nothing more than a compound of the words “break” and “fast.” When you wake up in the morning and have something to eat, you are breaking your fast from the evening.
It’s pretty straightforward and simple.
However, why do we call it breaking a fast rather than calling it something else like “the morning meal” or “the first meal of the day?”
Historically, breakfast was never that big of a deal. You didn’t wake up and start cooking. Breakfast, assuming someone actually ate breakfast, was usually nothing more than a piece of bread, perhaps a bit of cheese, and some ale. There weren’t special breakfast foods like we see today.
Thomas Aquinas wrote in his book Summa Theologica that eating too early was actually committing the sin of gluttony.
In Old English, the first meal of the day was called morgenmetten, which literally means the morning meal.
Over time, the term breakfast began to be used more often. The first written use of the word breakfast didn’t occur until the 14th century when Middle English was still spoken.
The first reference in the United States to breakfast was in 1620; the meal it referred to was biscuits and beer.
The origin of lunch is much more confusing than the rather straightforward origin of breakfast.
The first thing you need to know is that lunch is just short for luncheon.
The origin of the word luncheon isn’t totally clear, but it seems to come from the Old English word nuncheon. A nuncheon was a midday drink.
Now, I just told you a second ago that lunch is short of luncheon, and for the modern use of the word, that is true. However, the word lunch used to have a separate and different meaning that wasn’t short for luncheon.
Lunch use to refer to a hunk of something. The word lunch had an origin similar to the word lump.
So, a hunk of meat, cheese, or bread would be considered a lunch of meat, cheese, or bread.
Eventually, the hunk of something and the mid-day drink, a nuncheon, were combined to become….luncheon.
The original use of the word was not to describe a mid-day meal. It was almost synonymous with our modern word for snack.
For example, in 1785, Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language defined lunch and luncheon as “As much food as one’s hand can hold.”
The same dictionary defined Nunchion as “A piece of victuals eaten between meals.”
One theory I came across is that the word lunch or luncheon was only really used by coach inns where carriages would stop between cities in the 18th and much of the 19th century.
So, if lunch referred to a light snack, usually in the afternoon, how did it come to mean the mid-day meal?
To understand that, we have to understand the origin of the word dinner.
Dinner comes from the Old French word “disner” which means to dine. That word came from the Vulgar Latin word disj?j?n?re, which means to break a fast, aka, breakfast. The modern French word for breakfast is petit-déjeuner, which is quite similar.
So, the word dinner comes from Frech, which is derived from the Vulgar Latin word for breakfast.
Dinner came to mean the main meal of the day.
However, dinner, for the longest time, was not the evening meal. Dinner was what we would call lunch.
The main meal was usually eaten around midday for several reasons. For starters, there was light. In a world without artificial light, you would want as much light as possible to cook the main meal of the day, which would take the most time.
The second reason was that if you worked in the fields, which most people did, a big mid-day meal gave you energy and an excuse to get out of the mid-day sun.
This, of course, raises the next question: how and why did dinner become the evening meal instead of the midday meal?
This was due to the Industrial Revolution. When people began moving from the farm to the factory, they couldn’t take time off in the middle of the day.
The word used for the main meal of the day suck, but the time the meal was eaten changed to the evening when they got off work.
What did they eat in the middle of the day? They had a luncheon. The term which was previously used to describe a snack was now a full-blown meal, although workers in a factory probably did initially have a luncheon in the original sense of the word.
Luncheon was shortened to lunch, which was previously a word that meant something else.
So, what is the difference between dinner and supper?
In modern usage, supper and dinner are used interchangeably and are basically synonyms. However, there are some subtle differences.
While you can have dinner at home, most people do not go out for supper. Supper would be something you eat at home and most restaurant meals would be considered dinner….unless of course you are in Wisconsin which has its tradition of supper clubs, which is a whole other episode.
In fact, according to Google search, the upper midwest is the region where supper is most commonly used.
The word supper comes from the Old French word “souper,” which means “to sup,” referring to the act of eating the last meal of the day. This word traces back to the late Latin “suppa,” which means “soup” or “bread soaked in broth.”
So, supper was a lighter meal, usually the last meal of the day, and was often just soup and bread. Nothing fancy and nothing that required a lot of work.
When dinner moved from midday to the evening, it became sort of redundant with supper.
Just to be complete, I should at least address brunch. As I’m sure most of you can figure out, brunch is just a portmanteau of the words breakfast and lunch.
The word first started to appear around 1896, and it was used occasionally for about 80 years. The term brunch began to be used more and more in the early 1970s. The use of “brunch” in books has increased steadily since then until the present day.
So, that explains the origin of our meals. What about the basics of food itself?
Some of the most basic words describing food have changed dramatically over time and mean very different things today.
Lets start with the word meat.
In Old English, the word meat was spelled “m-e-t-e” and it referred to any sort of food. Meat was basically synonymous with our word food. So wheat, fruit, and nuts were all called meat.
The word originated in Old German and Frisian.
You are probably wondering, if everything was meat, what did they call…..meat?
That was known as flesh-meat. Likewise, some plants would be known as green-meat, and white-meat would be dairy products.
The use of the word meat to describe the flesh from animals began to be used around the year 1300.
Just as confusing is the origin of the word fruit.
The word “fruit” comes from the Old French “fruït” or “fruict,” which in turn comes from the Latin word “fructus,” meaning “enjoyment, delight, or produce.” The Latin “fructus” is derived from “frui,” which means “to enjoy” or “to use,” emphasizing the pleasure derived from consuming or using the product of plants.
Today, fruit means something very specific. We can have debates as to if a tomato is a fruit or a vegetable because we have that distinction.
The term “fruit” in English began to be used in the 12th century, and it initially meant any useful product of the earth. By the original meaning, vegetables would be fruit, as would nuts, as well as what we would call fruit.
This old use of the word fruit can still be seen in the phrase “the fruit of the Earth” which has a general meaning, not a specific one.
So, if meat meant food, and fruit meant all plants, what word was used to describe what we call fruit?
The word for fruit was apple. The word “apple” comes from the Old English word “æppel.”
The Old English “æppel” is derived from the Proto-Germanic word “*aplaz,” which is also the source of similar words in other Germanic languages, such as Old High German “apful” and Old Norse “epli.”
The word æppel refere to any kind of fruit or round object. In some contexts, it specifically referred to apples as we know them today, but it was also a more general term for fruits like nuts and berries.
This confusion of apple for fruit is one of the reasons why the fruit from the Garden of Eden is often depicted as an apple.
In the original Hebrew, the word used is “peri” which just means fruit. If you were telling the story of the Garden of Eden in Old English, you would have called the fruit an æppel.
As the word apple became more specific, the use of the word apple in the story from Genesis stuck even though the meaning changed..
Another possible reason given is that in Latin, the words for apple and evil are very similar. Malum vs malum. Hence, the use of apple would have been a sort of play on words.
By the Middle Ages, apple developed its modern usage to only describe a particular type of fruit from a particular type of tree.
So if meat meant food, fruit meant plants, and apple meant fruit, what word was used to describe what we would call vegetables?
In Old English, there wasn’t a word to describe exactly what we would call vegetables, because if you remember back to my episode on cruciferous vegetables, they aren’t found in nature. They were developed over the centuries by selective breeding.
The closest word that would describe something akin to a vegetable would be the word “wort” or “wyrt.” Wyrt referred to any green plant that might have been edible, such as cabbage or an herb.
One of the few remaining uses of the word that harkens back to its original meanin would be the plant called “Saint John’s Wort.” Beyond that, wort really isn’t used for much of anything anymore.
I’ve barely scratched the surface in this episode in covering the origins of the many words we use for foods, so a follow up episode will be necessary at some point in the future.
The one thing you should take away from this episode is that the words we used for meals and food in the past once had very different meanings from what they do today.
Slowly, over time, those words became more specific about what they were referring to, eventually morphing into the language we have today.
