What do you call the meals of the day in your dialect?

"Speaking about Europe, there are the native Anglophones who live in countries where English is the official language and / or the lingua franca (UK and Ireland, and that's about all). "

What about Malta and Gibraltar?

There are three English-speaking nations in the EU - Britain, Ireland and Malta. Gibraltar is also part of the EU as it is British territory.

Terry - I'm from Australia and yes recess is used for morning breaks given in school but sometimes it gets carried out to general breaks by people not attending school. Morning tea would generally be prefered though.

Thanks for getting back, Frances. Recess never carries out to general breaks over here. It is always just a school yard break. It's really interesting to see how the English language is used and modified in different places.

I always had tea with my Irish grandmother but it was never actually called, "tea.' We just drank it in the early morning with toast - breakfast - although my mother insisted upon cereal and my father -old New England yankee stock, made us bacon and eggs on Saturdays.

In the late morning and afternoons with my grandmother, I had tea and pound cake or Lorna Doones, (shortbread I think these cookies are called in England and Ireland. Not sure what they're called in Australia.)

My mother was more Americanized (and almost obsessive about it) and often drank coffee, instead. My father was a tea drinker even though his family had come from England but in the 1600's. Of course the tea my grandmother an dparents served me was like a drop of tea with lots of milk as they thought tea would stunt my growth. It did no good though, as I'm barely 5-foot 1 inch. I think that's roughly four meters, but I'm not sure, anyway, short.

Are your tea times in Australia much like those in England and Ireland and do you call it "tea" or just drink it? Also I've noticed on the old Miss Marple series from PBS, late morning tea is called "elevensis." Is it still called that and do they call it that in Australia as well. I guess I'm asking this of all the British citizens on this site. Thanks.

Btw, 5'1" is about one and a half meters. One gets nice round factors of 10 with metric. Have fun with divisions of 12 and 3.

Thanks, guest. One and half meters. I'll remember that - how short I am in other measurements.

You're a bit taller... 1.55m to be more precise :)

It's a bit of a hybrid here in Hong Kong, an international melting pot where nearly everyone speaks English, but as a second language.

People here generally have a lot of meals!!
- Breakfast in the morning.
- Lunch at midday.
- High tea in the afternoon.
- Dinner in the evening.
- Midnight snack late in the night, but almost no one refers to that in English.

Notes:
- "Dinner" is used to refer to lunch at schools, but almost nowhere else.
- "Supper" and "brunch" are never heard of.
- There is a clear distinction between "high tea" in the afternoon and "dinner" in the evening.

And someone 4 metres tall would be a real giant ;)

I wonder what generation Terry belongs to.

I visted San Francisco once because a cousin lived there, and I "shadowed" that cousin at his high school for a day. It looked like everyone there was much more familiar with the metric system than the imperial system: if they saw a long, flat wooden stick, they'd call it a "metre (oops... meter) stick" and not a "yard stick". Also, the problems in their maths textbooks generally used the metric system.

So, I guess the US educational system switched from imperial to metric some time ago? Does someone know of an "generation gap" existing somewhere between users of the metric (e.g. metre, litre) and imperial (e.g. foot, gallon) systems in the US?

In the UK, we use both imperial and metric systems. It's a tad confusing sometimes! Some examples: all road signs are in miles, not kilometres; we mostly use feet and inches to talk about our height, not centimetres; and most people would give their weight in pounds, not kilograms (in the UK, we also use the measurement of a 'stone', which is 14 pounds). However, petrol (gasoline) is sold in litres, not gallons (and did you know that a US and a British gallon are different??), supermarket products are sold in kilos and litres, and my generation at least uses Celsius, not Fahrenheit, though my parents prefer Fahrenheit.

<<In the UK, we use both imperial and metric systems. It's a tad confusing sometimes! Some examples: all road signs are in miles, not kilometres; we mostly use feet and inches to talk about our height, not centimetres; and most people would give their weight in pounds, not kilograms (in the UK, we also use the measurement of a 'stone', which is 14 pounds). However, petrol (gasoline) is sold in litres, not gallons (and did you know that a US and a British gallon are different??), supermarket products are sold in kilos and litres, and my generation at least uses Celsius, not Fahrenheit, though my parents prefer Fahrenheit.>>

It's only recently that petrol changed from gallons to litres in the UK- about 1991 and I think about 1995 from pounds to kg (for the benefit of non-UK citizens, I'm not trying to teach my Grandmother to suck eggs. I wonder when eggs will go metric and sold in 10s instead of by the dozen?) I think ITV weather still gives temperature in both F and C. I have a strange tendency to think in F on warm summer days and C on cold winter days. Must be about -3 outside at the moment! I can't wait 'til the summer and it gets into the 80s.

<<My mother was more Americanized (and almost obsessive about it) and often drank coffee, instead. My father was a tea drinker even though his family had come from England but in the 1600's.>>

Coffee has always been drunk in England and I would say it's probably more popular than tea is these days. In Pepys' diary he reguarly frequents the Coffee houses in 1660s London, but in one part he mentions talks about someone offering him a "cup of tee" which was the first time he'd ever tasted it and I think it was the Chinese variety rather than the brown Indian type more commonly drunk today.

Desayuno
Almuerzo
Comida
Cena

the first meal of the day = breakfast, colloq. brekkie

a midday meal (normal/casual) = lunch, but breakfast and dinner both take precedence.

an evening meal (weekdays) = tea, but seeing as dinner takes precedence and usually tea is dinner, I'd usually call it dinner. Also, one meal will be dinner, so if lunch was it, then tea's it, because there's nothing else left! So basically tea's only tea if lunch was dinner, which usually only happens around Christmas. Oh, and if lunch was a bbq then tea's probably tea too.

a large, formal meal (weekend) = dinner (well, dinner's just a meal with dessert)

a mid-morning or midday first meal (weekends): probably I'd say I'm having "breakfast for lunch" if it's after noon, but if it's before it's just breakfast.

a meal midway through an evening work shift = probably dinner/tea, though normally I'd probably have my dinner earlier if needs be.

A morning quick meal/snack = morning tea, little lunch or recess, the latter two both being generalisations from school terminology. When I was in primary school, we had morning tea if we were at home, and little lunch if we were at school, but the content would be the same. Nowadays of course I'm not voluntarily up early enough to have time between brekkie and lunch to want a morning tea!

a late afternoon quick meal/snack = afternoon tea.

A late evening quick meal/snack = supper.

If the content and time are incongruent, I might say I was having "breakfast for lunch" or "lunch for afternoon tea".

During the holidays (like now, yay! for being in a hemisphere which rather sensibly has chrissie & summer coinciding) when I tend to sleep in & stay up late a lot, my eating tends to sway from the normal "Breakfast, lunch and dinner" into "Breakfast (at lunchtime), dinner (at teatime) and supper (at midnightish)". In such a circumstance though, brekkie and dinner will tend to be a bit heavier than normal, and supper will incline itself to something smaller & more desserty+a cup of tea. On which topic given it's after quart' to one in the a.m., I think I'll go find some.

<<It's only recently that petrol changed from gallons to litres in the UK- about 1991 and I think about 1995 from pounds to kg (for the benefit of non-UK citizens, I'm not trying to teach my Grandmother to suck eggs. I wonder when eggs will go metric and sold in 10s instead of by the dozen?) I think ITV weather still gives temperature in both F and C. I have a strange tendency to think in F on warm summer days and C on cold winter days. Must be about -3 outside at the moment! I can't wait 'til the summer and it gets into the 80s. >>

I do that too - 'in the 90s' sounds much more impressive than 'in the 30s'! It was only a few years ago that supermarkets switched to kg, and I'm still not totally comfortable with it, to be honest - I find myself at the cheese counter asking for 'the equivalent of half a pound of cheddar, please'! Anyway, as long as they don't muck around with pints and half-pints at the pub.....!

I, being an Australian born after the mid-seventies some time, having been born and bred in a metric-speaking country, would rather not experience temperatures of the 90s! The water in my mug beside me, however, did.

As for the beer in your pub, seeing as I expect you buy it by the glass, I'm not so sure whether it makes a difference if you're buying a pint of beer, in a glass, or a glass of beer (called a pint) containing a-bit-shy-of-600 mills of beer. The latter is what happens in pubs in some parts of Australia. I can hardly imagine they'll turn around and start offering you 500 mills or a litre, as the prol in George Orwell's _Ninteen Eighty-four_ complains about! (After all, in Europe they have 330 mill cans and bottles and hereabouts in Oz we have 375 mL cans and stubbies and 600 mL bottles of softdrink and so forth....)

(The equivalent of half a pound of cheese is, if I'm not too much mistaken, 125 g or a quarter of a kilo of the same. But I believe pounds weigh different amounts for different things like gold, and an ounce of water doesn't weigh an ounce!)

("Mill", of course, means "mL", which is how you pronounce "mL", and I'm using it because the impression you get on the Internet from unmetric users who think that under the metric system colloquialisms & expressions like "half a litre" are forbidden.... Normally, of course, I'd just write "mL", and you'd read "mill(s)", and we'd get on just fine.)