4

From meatship to trough,

and nuncheon to short-eat
WORDS FOR A (LIG HT) ME A L

The ancient origins of meal lie in words to do with measuring, distantly

related to metre and moon. In its earliest citations in Old English, it was a
measure: one would talk about ‘pouring three meals of wine’, for ex-
ample. And until the late Middle Ages people continued to form words in
which the meal element meant ‘a quantity at a time’, as in Old English
drop-meal (‘drop by drop’), foot-meal (‘step by step’), and heap-meal ‘in
large numbers’, or Middle English gobbetmeal (‘in gobbets’), cupmeal
(‘cup by cup’), and littlemeal (‘little by little’). Coinages of this kind then
died out, apart from isolated instances (such as pagemeal ‘page by page’ in
Copyright © 2014. Oxford University Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

1827). Today we have only one word left to remind us of what was once a
highly productive formation: piecemeal ‘one piece at a time’.
In Old English meal was also being used to mean ‘time’ or ‘occasion’,
especially when it referred to a specific moment a person had in mind.
‘Time to go’, says Beowulf at one point (Beowulf, line 316): mæl is me to
faran. So it was a very short semantic step from here to the sense of a ‘cus-
tomary occasion for taking food or drink’, which allows this word to open
the listing below.
The other word that was very influential in this semantic field was
meat, which in its oldest use simply meant ‘food’ – especially solid food, as
opposed to drink (though some writers in the Middle Ages used it for
everything). It later lost this sense in standard English, apart from in a few
proverbial expressions, such as one man’s meat is another man’s poison and
in the names of the foodstuffs mincemeat and sweetmeat, but in regional
dialect it remains strong. The English Dialect Dictionary contains several

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 58 Words for a (light) meal
expressions, such as meat-board (‘dining table’) and meat-house (‘larder’),
or meatable (‘having a good appetite’) and fall from your meat (‘having a
poor one’). It’s still common in parts of Scotland, where we find such ex-
pressions as he likes his meat (said of someone looking especially well-fed)
or that’s a good meat-house (a place where there’s good food to be had).
There are relatively few general words for ‘meal’ (18), and the list below
shows a remarkable gap (between 1538 and 1804) where there seems to be
no lexical development of this field at all. When words do start to emerge,
in the nineteenth century, the contrast with the earlier period is striking.
The first ten words in the list are all in general educated use – most, in-
deed, suggesting an ‘upmarket’ social setting (meatship, mealtide, refec-
tion, repas, repast, recreation). Then after 1800, we find very ‘downmarket’
words like grub and nosh, as well as departures from normal grammar
(cooking, eat), and colloquialisms from abroad (scoff, khana).

Light meals
The paucity of items in the general category is because in everyday life it
is individual meals and mealtimes that provide the talking-point, and the
hierarchical organization of HTOED enables this kind of difference to be
easily seen. The second list below illustrates a lower-level category, the
words for a light meal. It contains three times as many items as in the gen-
eral category, and this is certainly an underestimate, for the kind of usage
we see in the final item (the South Asian short-eat) is likely to be repeated,
with interesting variations, in other parts of the English-speaking world
that have as yet received little or no lexical study.
As things stand, we see in the list a great deal of local dialect usage
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(such as bagging, crib, morsel) as well as international variants (nuncheon,

merenda, mug-up, smoke-ho). The time of day at which snacks are taken is
evidently an important regional factor (undern, four-hours, fourses,
elevens). So is the time available to eat, as seen in the words for a hasty
snack (snatch, snap, bait). Social variation can be observed in society’s
dinnerette and tray, schools’ bever and munchin, and religion’s mixtum
and collation, as well as in the usage controversies that accompany the
history of luncheon and lunch. There is a hint of weight-watchers’ eu-
phemism in second breakfast and a little something.

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 Words for a (light) meal 59

Timeline

1 Meals in general

meal King Alfred, in his translation of St Gregory’s Pastoral Care,

eOE provides the earliest OED citation for the sense of a specific
mealtime. In a chapter (44) on the merits of fasting, he
points out that it’s not very good fasting practice to keep
your leftovers from one meal so that you can eat them at
another meal; rather, you should give them to the poor.

meatship † The earliest term incorporating meat in its general sense of

lOE ‘food’. The -ship suffix here means ‘being in a state to do
with’, so meatship has the connotation of a special occasion,
such as a feast or banquet. A similar example of the
formation in modern English is courtship. The usage died
out during the Middle Ages.

meal of meat The earliest combination of the two basic terms, also found
c.1330 as meal’s meat, widely used in dialects throughout the
British Isles. ‘Ah wadn’t give’m a meal’s meat if he was
starvin’, says a Cumberland speaker, recorded in the English
Dialect Dictionary. OED citations from authors such as John
Dryden and Charles Lamb show that the expression had
some currency for a while in standard English.

refection A communal meal, especially one taken in a religious

c.1425 house. The word has a somewhat self-conscious tone when
used outside of such settings. In Christian tradition, it is
recalled on the Fourth Sunday of Lent (Refection Sunday),
when the first reading is the story from the Old Testament
of Joseph feeding his brothers, and the Gospel for the day is
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the report of Jesus feeding the five thousand.

eating † An everyday word which, surprisingly, never achieved

1483 much dialect presence in the sense of ‘meal’. That it had any
popularity at all is probably due to Myles Coverdale, who
used it in his Bible translation: ‘Be not greedy in every
eating’ (Ecclesiasticus 37), though this usage failed to
impress the King James translators, who used meats.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton opts for it in his novel Kenelm
Chillingly (1873): ‘Epochs are signalised by their eatings.’

mealtide † Literally, ‘mealtime’, but then applied to the actual meal

1485 itself. The first OED citation refers to someone paying six
shillings and eight pence for his ‘mealtides from Sunday till
Friday’.

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 60 Words for a (light) meal

repas Directly from French repas (‘meal’), the word had some
c.1485 popularity in the eighteenth century (though Samuel
Johnson does not record it in his Dictionary). It has resurfaced
as a ‘new’ French loan in modern writing that tries to capture
an olde-world flavour, as in a Mail on Sunday (2004) citation
in the OED: ‘Horses bearing knights or maidens wound along
the streets towards the evening’s repas.’

breakfast Only the first meal of the day is now called a breakfast, but
1526 it was formerly also used in a wider sense of a ‘meal’ which
could occur at any time of day, as long as the eaters are
especially hungry – a usage still encountered in the notion
of a wedding-breakfast.

repast Today, repast is used more figuratively than literally:

1530 nourishment for the mind rather than the body (as when in
a 1992 OED citation a periodical is described as ‘a satisfying
intellectual repast’). When applied to food, it describes the
quality or quantity of what is on offer rather than the
occasion per se (as in ‘a rich repast’). The associations are
always positive (rich, full, luxurious, plentiful . . .), so when
used in the sense of ‘meal’ the implication is usually that
one is being provided with something special.

recreation † The modern sense of ‘pleasurable activity’ is anticipated in

1538 the earliest meaning of this word in English, ‘refreshment
through eating’, which was narrowed further when used to
mean a particular meal. The first OED citation is actually from
a bequest, in which the writer leaves to the Fellowship of
Drapers the sum of five pounds ‘for a recreation or a dinner’.

cooking † A quotation from the essayist William Taylor of Norwich

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1804 (‘swallowing two cookings a day’) heralded a possible

countable future for this noun, as had happened with
baking (‘a batch of bread baked at one time’), drinking (‘an
occasion of drinking’), tasting (as in ‘a wine-tasting’), and
some other alimentary nouns. But it remains the only
citation in the OED.

eat One of the earliest and simplest attempts to find a colloquial

1844 way of referring to a meal: turning the verb into a
countable noun. The earliest OED citation is of a plural, the
writer talking of activities that might take place ‘between
the eats’, but the singular was also routine, judging by the
way a Tennessee innkeeper described his establishment as
‘25 cents a sleep, 25 cents an eat’ (1904). The usage is still
with us – indeed, it’s evidently quite trendy. We find people
organizing an eat-in. And a 2009 restaurant review in a
lifestyle section of a magazine is headed ‘Quite an eat’.

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 Words for a (light) meal 61

scoff A South African colloquialism, from Dutch schoft, which

1846 spread around English-speaking southern Africa, and
eventually travelled abroad. Twentieth-century OED
citations illustrate its slang use in Australia, Canada, and
Britain, in various spellings (schoff, skoff, scorf). The word
was common among tramps and in the criminal
underworld, but has been given a class makeover, if this
1981 quotation from the Guardian is anything to go by: ‘Ah!
Scoff ahoy! I spy Florida Cocktail and Gammon Steak
Hawaii!’

grub † Grub – slang for ‘food’ – was an uncountable noun when it

1857 arrived in the seventeenth century, and it stayed that way
(as in grub up! and lovely grub). But there is a single OED
citation from Thomas Hughes’s novel Tom Brown’s School
Days which shows that it had (and perhaps still has) a
countable potential: ‘Twice as good a grub as we should
have got in the hall.’

khana Khana is Hindi for ‘food, dinner’. The word arrived in

1859 English in the middle of the British Empire period in India:
an invitation to dinner was called a burra khanah. These
days, the word is most often seen as part of the name of
Indian Restaurants, khana having other meanings such as
‘house, cook-room’. Research into this item produced one
of the best puns encountered during the project – an
aphrodisiac cookbook called Khana Sutra.

nosh Nosh was at first a Yiddish word which emerged in the USA
1964 towards the end of the nineteenth century for a nibbly
snack, especially one eaten between meals. When the
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British took it over, it came to be used as slang for any meal –

and in nosh-up for one that has been prepared informally
but likely to be large and satisfying.

trough Trough has long been a feature of upper-class slang for a

1981 dining-table: P. G. Wodehouse has someone ‘digging in at
the trough’ in Very Good, Jeeves (1930, ch. 4). Dylan Thomas
has Mrs Pugh describe her husband’s plate in the same way:
‘What’s that book by your trough?’ (Under Milk Wood,
1954). The OED citation for a possible sense of ‘meal’ is from
a Michael Innes novel – ‘If he didn’t stir his stumps he
would be late for the trough’ – but the context could also
support the other senses.

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 62 Words for a (light) meal

2 Light meals

nuncheon A shench (‘cupful, drink of liquor’) at noon (‘the ninth hour

1260 of the day’, according to the Roman method of calculating
times from sunrise). The earliest OED citation actually
spells it noonschench. A pronunciation with a ‘shun’ ending
emerged, leading to such spellings as nuncion and nuntion,
and eventually (because of the influence of such words as
truncheon) as nuncheon. It remains a popular regional
dialect word, often abbreviated as nunch, especially in the
southern counties of England; but it also turns up in North
America. It was a ‘word of the day’ in the Newfoundland
Telegram (22 December 2010): ‘snack taken between any
two of the main meals, especially in the woods or while
fishing or sealing’.

morsel Today this is a small piece of food, or mouthful (from

c.1382 French morceau). But Wycliffe used it to mean a small meal
(Job eats a mossel), and this usage spread (as in ‘we were
eating our morsel at home’ by the socialite Lady Sydney
Morgan in 1818). Today it is heard only in some regional
dialects in England.

refection Although used as a word for a meal (see above), refection also
c.1439 came to be used for a light meal, often in the phrase a little
refection. If a man has such a mid-morning snack, says Thomas
Elyot in The Governour (1531), he will have ‘his invention
quicker, his judgement perfecter, his tongue readier’.

mixtum † A single quotation from William Caxton shows this Latin

c.1490 word used to mean a light monastic meal. He defines it
specifically as the kind of meal eaten by the monk who
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reads aloud while others are eating.

bever † The word arrives in the mid-1400s meaning a drink (from

1500 Latin bibere ‘to drink’ via French), but soon broadened to
mean a snack, usually taken between the midday and
evening meals. It was widely used in British dialects, but
Joseph Wright at the end of the nineteenth century thought
it was becoming obsolete. In some public schools (such as
Eton), it was slang for an afternoon drink.

banquet † Today a banquet can be only a sumptuous feast marking a

1509 special occasion. We therefore have to be careful when we
see the word used in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, when people would talk of a ‘running banquet’
(as in Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Henry VIII, 1613, 5.3.63)
or of ‘banquets between meals’, where only the lightest of
snacks is intended.

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 Words for a (light) meal 63

collation Another monastic word for a light snack taken at close of

1525 day, or replacing a main meal on a fasting day. Outside of
the Church, it meant any light meal, especially one that
needed little preparation (as in a ‘cold collation’). Dr
Johnson came to realize there was more to a collation
than simply ‘a repast’ – the definition he gives in the first
edition of his Dictionary. In the fourth edition he adds,
albeit with some understatement: ‘a treat less than
a feast’.

bite One of the oldest and most widely used colloquialisms for a
1562 snack. In regional dialect it was often used in the
expression bite and sup (‘food and drink’).

snatch The primary sense of the verb transfers to this usage: a light
1570 meal prepared or eaten quickly. One would ‘take a snatch’
before going to do something. ‘A mouthful between meals’,
says a Suffolk dialect collection (1823).

beverage † A single quotation, from William Harrison’s Description of

1577 England (ch. 7), talks about the way people used to have
‘beverages or nuntions after dinner’. He is delighted that
these ‘odd repasts’ have died out – but regrets that there are
still ‘here and there some young, hungry stomach that
cannot fast till dinner-time’.

a little Another first recorded use from William Harrison (ch. 6),
something but popular in present-day writing, though often
1577 referring to an alcoholic drink rather than food. This is
however not the sense used by Pooh (in A. A. Milne’s
Winnie-the-Pooh, 1926, ch. 6), who decides that it is ‘time
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for a little something’ – and takes the top off his jar
of honey.

anders-meat † Two dictionary citations over a decade are the only

1598 illustrations of this curious expression in the OED. It is
probably a development of Old English undern-mete, ‘food
eaten at the third hour of the day’ – that is, at around nine
o’clock (see undern below).

four-hours † A Scots expression: a light refreshment taken at around

1637 four o’clock in the afternoon, and also called a four hours
penny. A 1651 historian explains: ‘the name of the after-
noon refreshment of ale (etc)’. A splendid quotation from
Galloway, reported in the English Dialect Dictionary,
illustrates: ‘The Archangel Gawbriel (nae less) is waitin’ to
tak’ his fower-’oors wi’ him.’ The Chambers Concise Scots
Dictionary finds the expression obsolete by the early
twentieth century.

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 64 Words for a (light) meal

watering † The word is normally used only with reference to liquid

1637 refreshment (as in the twentieth-century British use of
watering-hole for a bar), but a single OED citation suggests
it did once mean a light afternoon meal. In The Elder
Brother (1637, a collaboration of dramatists Francis
Beaumont, John Fletcher, and Philip Massinger) Andrew
gives a description of his master’s dietary day: ‘he breaks
his fast with Aristotle, dines with Tully, takes his watering
with the Muses, sups with Livy’ (1.2).

refreshment ‘Refreshments are available in …’ This is the standard

1639 modern use, usually in the plural, and often preceded
(somewhat tautologously) by light.

snap Like snatch (above), a hasty snack, widely used in dialects

1642 of England and Scotland, and the source of several other
expressions, such as snap-time, snap-tin, and snap-box. One
would take ‘a snap and away’ (i.e. a quick bite to eat and
then leave). A woman who sold gingerbread cakes was, in
some parts, called a snap-wife. Miners and railwaymen
would take a snap to work. In standard English, the notion
is reflected in brandy-snap.

luncheon The word still has echoes of its original colloquial

c.1652 meaning: a light repast taken between two of the main
meals, usually between breakfast and midday. For those
for whom dinner was the word for the main meal of the
day, eaten in the evening, then luncheon would describe
the meal taken in the middle of the day – a less
substantial and less ceremonious occasion. It has been
replaced by lunch in everyday discourse (see below),
other than in very formal contexts, such as menus for
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special occasions.

crib A dialect word that travelled from Britain to Australia and

c.1652 New Zealand, showing a similar development to snap
(above). Workers would take their crib in a crib-bag or crib-
tin, and would eat it at crib-time.

munchin † Munch is onomatopoeic, but probably influenced by French

1657 manger ‘to eat’. The only OED citation for munchin is a slang
schoolboy use (as with bever above), probably on analogy
with nuncheon and luncheon. There is also an isolated
example (1611) of muncheon as a verb. A related dialect use
from Yorkshire, munching and eating, refers to a habit of
eating at any time of the day.

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 Words for a (light) meal 65

bait † Bait, ‘attractive food for fish’, broadened its meaning in the
c.1661 sixteenth century: it came to be used for a light meal taken by
travellers on a journey, and during the following century for
any hasty snack taken between meals. Like crib and snap
(above), it became widely used in regional dialect, along with
associated words such as bait-time, bait-bag, and bait-poke.

whet † The core sense of the verb (‘sharpen’) had by the sixteenth
1688 century developed an association with meals (to whet the
appetite), and a noun use of whet to mean ‘appetizer’ was a
natural next step. At first a small draught of liquor, it soon
included small portions of food – what would later (from
around the 1740s) be called hors d’oeuvres. A household
book from 1769 contains instructions about how ‘to make a
nice whet before dinner’.

undern A light meal, usually taken in the afternoon, but sometimes

1691 mid-morning. It is widely represented in Scottish and English
dialects, in a huge variety of spellings, such as andren (see
anders-meat above), ontron, horndoon, and yender.

merenda Travelling in Europe brought English speakers into contact

1740 with foreign eating-habits. The merenda was encountered
in Italy – a light meal usually taken in the afternoon.

bagging A word widely used in the northern counties of England for

1746 food taken between regular meals – usually mid-afternoon,
but sometimes mid-morning. Related words include
bagging-time and bagging-can. In Lancashire, if you missed
your afternoon tea, you were said to be baggingless.

snack Originally in English, a snack was a snap or bite, especially

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1757 from a dog. Later (seventeenth century), it was used for a

small quantity of drink: one would take ‘a snack of brandy’,
for example. The modern sense emerged in the eighteenth
century, and has remained popular, developing quite a
family of associated expressions, such as snack food, snack
bar, and snack-sized.

coffee The word for the drink arrived at the very end of the
1774 sixteenth century, and was occasionally used to mean a
light meal at which coffee is taken. This sense has
disappeared now, but echoes of it can still be heard. If you
go to a coffee-morning, you would expect to be offered
something to eat as well as coffee. And in twentieth-century
US slang, a coffee-and unambiguously points to a
combination of coffee and – doughnut, roll, or similar.

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 66 Words for a (light) meal

second A snack taken late in the morning, or even into the early
breakfast afternoon. The word is achieving a new lease of life.
1775 According to a news report in Time magazine (29 February
2012), ‘more Americans are consuming breakfast in stages
thanks to on-the-go lifestyles and the belief that multiple,
smaller meals are healthier than three large ones’. The
headline: More Americans Are Treating Themselves to ‘Second
Breakfast’.

stay-stomach † A snack which keeps hunger-pangs at bay. William Cobbett,

1800 in his Rural Rides (1825) kept some bits of bread and meat
in his pocket ‘as stay-stomachs’. A similar later usage (1833)
was a stay-bit.

damper † A small amount of food or drink that ‘damps down’

1804 feelings of hunger between meals. Charles Lamb, in the
persona of Edax, wrote a letter to the editor of The
Reflector periodical in 1811 complaining about being
afflicted with a ‘most inordinate appetite’, requiring him to
‘make up by a damper’ before he goes out to dinner, to
stop him eating too much. His companions nicknamed
him ‘Doublemeal’.

noonshine † An adaptation of nuncheon (see above), used by Jane

1808 Austen in her letters: ‘The tide is just right for our going
immediately after noonshine’. She may have made up the
word herself, as a facetious coinage, but noonchine is
recorded from Hampshire in the English Dialect Dictionary.

by-bit † In parts of Scotland, a light snack between main meals.

1819 Walter Scott is the sole OED citation, from The Bride of
Lammermoor (ch. 5): Lord Turntippet hopes to receive
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some money from the local privy council ‘for a bye-bit

between meals for mysell’.

fourses A word in the tradition earlier established by four-hours

1823 (see above) for a light meal taken by workers in the
afternoon. It is always found in the plural, and parallel to
elevenses for the corresponding refreshment taken in the
morning. Dialect variants include fours in Hertfordshire
and a four o’clock in the Midlands.

lunch Lunch has had a chequered history. When it emerged in the

1829 early nineteenth century as an abbreviation of luncheon,
some socialites considered it the latest thing in fashion and
adopted it, while others thought it a vulgarism and avoided
it. According to the earliest recorded use of the word, it was
given a social boost when accepted by the London social
club, Almack’s, the writer commenting that ‘luncheon is
avoided as unsuitable to the polished society there

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 Words for a (light) meal 67

exhibited’. In some dialects, it developed a more general sense,

related to the original (sixteenth century) use of lunch to mean
a thick piece (or lump) of meat: a light meal taken at any time
of the day. OED citations show people preparing a lunch in the
evening or even at midnight. The daytime use is also found in
HTOED in the subcategory ‘midday meal or lunch’.

picnic meal Picnics were fashionable social events, with each guest
1839 contributing a share of the food, before they became
informal out-of-door excursions. Today a picnic meal (or the
later picnic luncheon (1855), picnic lunch (1865), and picnic
tea (1869)) is usually far less elaborate than one taken at
home, reflecting the relaxed nature of the occasions.

elevens Eleven o’clock in the morning, like four in the afternoon

1849 (see above), was the time for a refreshment break. Dialect
words in England and Scotland include several variants:
elevens, an elevener, and an eleven o’clock. A typical
example, from Suffolk: ‘I commonly has a drop [of ale] for
my elevens’. The word later travelled up the social scale,
emerging as elevenses (1887) among the middle classes.

dinnerette A society coinage, illustrated by a single OED citation from

1872 Mortimer Collins’s novel The Princess Clarice. The word is
still with us: a US online cooking class in 2013 includes a
recipe for ‘A full circle meal with a sit down dinnerette after
with all the guests’.

smoke-ho An expression for a rest period that emerged in Australia and

1874 New Zealand, but also known among sailors worldwide. The
‘smoking’ part is one of the options, as a 1953 OED citation
illustrates: ‘a billy of tea and a slice of brownie . . . a smoko tea’.
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soldier’s A jocular usage, reflecting the fact that, after tea, the final
supper meal of a soldier’s day, the only option was a smoke and a
1893 drink of water. From a food point of view, a soldier’s supper
= nothing at all.

mug-up A chiefly Canadian word for a snack and hot drink, mainly
1909 used by trappers and traders in the far north of the country.
The snack could be substantial, as in this 1972 verb use:
‘We . . . mugged up on boiled eggs, toast, jam, and coffee.’

tray A typically high-society usage: a tray of food brought to

1914 someone who is unable or unwilling to eat at a dining table.
Because of the small size of a tray, it would need to be a
light meal, often contrasted with a full meal. In Edward
Frederic Benson’s Trouble for Lucia (1939), Lucia suggests
that her proposed visit to Sheffield Castle at an
inconvenient time would cause the hostess no problems:
‘My maid would bring me a tray instead of dinner’.

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 68 Words for a (light) meal

café complet The ‘complet’ part lies in the accompanying food. As

1933 Pamela Price puts it in her France: A Food and Wine Guide
(1966), the expression means ‘coffee with milk and lumps
of sugar accompanied by bread or rolls and butter;
sometimes jam is included’. It is not a good substitute for
breakfast, according to M. V. Hughes in A London Home in
the 1890s (1937): ‘Our breakfast consisted of café complet. I
made it as “complet” as I could, but was ravenous by
midday.’

nosh Before nosh became British and hearty (see above), it was a
c.1941 North American between-meals snack. A Baltimore paper
refers to ‘a light and tasty premeal nosh’ (1997).

snax A respelling of snacks, used chiefly in brand-names and

1947 advertising, and widely seen in shop names, such as Snax
Cafe, Snax in the City, and Snax 2 Go. The first recorded
usage is in Say the Word by journalist and language pundit
Ivor Brown, who doesn’t like it at all: ‘Why does such shop-
window spelling, Sox and Snax, irritate me so?’ I have no
idea.

ploughman’s A traditional British cold meal, based on bread, cheese, and

lunch salad, served in public houses at lunchtime; informally
1956 shortened to ploughman’s. An 1837 OED citation refers to a
ploughman’s luncheon, but there is no further example of
this, and indeed we do not see the notion again until the
1950s. Views vary. Barry Maitland has a character in his
novel The Marx Sisters (1995) grumble that ‘No ploughman
ever survived on these scraps.’ On the other hand, I have
sometimes been served up with one of these lunches that
would have needed two ploughmen to eat.
Copyright © 2014. Oxford University Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

munchie Another word in the tradition of munchin (see above),

1959 heard among British schoolchildren, and also recorded in
Australia and North America. In the USA, the word was
adopted by drug-users for the snack that alleviates hunger
after taking marijuana.

playlunch In Australia and New Zealand, a snack taken by children to

1960 school to eat during the morning break.

short-eat A word from Sri Lanka and India, referring to a variety of

1962 small, easy-to-eat items, such as egg or vegetable rolls,
buyable from short-eat shops. ‘Order your short-eats, cakes
and pastries’ says a catering advertisement. There will
doubtless be equivalents in other parts of the English-
speaking world that have still to be recorded.

Crystal, D. (2014). Words in time and place : Exploring language through the historical thesaurus of the oxford
english dictionary. Oxford University Press, Incorporated.
Created from hkbu-ebooks on 2025-01-08 01:27:02.
 Words for a (light) meal 69

the external world

the living world

people life textile materials

food and drink

food

big or substantial meal MEAL sit-down meal

heavy meal (noun) buffet or standing meal
makeshift meal
LIGHT MEAL meal by type of food
OR SNACKS fast-day meal
communal or public
meal
interval for single meal at Inns of
Copyright © 2014. Oxford University Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

for travellers Court

meal at fixed price
breakfast or morning
meal
brunch or pre-lunch
midday meal or lunch
afternoon meal
tea
main meal or /dinner
evening meal or supper
retiring or secondary
meal
ritual meal
served in a basket
sitting of meal

Crystal, D. (2014). Words in time and place : Exploring language through the historical thesaurus of the oxford
english dictionary. Oxford University Press, Incorporated.
Created from hkbu-ebooks on 2025-01-08 01:27:02.
Copyright © 2014. Oxford University Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Crystal, D. (2014). Words in time and place : Exploring language through the historical thesaurus of the oxford
english dictionary. Oxford University Press, Incorporated.
Created from hkbu-ebooks on 2025-01-08 01:27:02.