Vocabulary
Dinner, Tea or Supper? What You Call the Evening Meal
In much of northern England, Scotland and Wales, the evening meal is tea and the midday meal is dinner. In the south of England and most of North America the evening meal is dinner. Supper survives across the American South and in parts of Scotland, sometimes for the main meal and sometimes for a late snack.
The question, as everyone in the survey sees it
What do you usually call the main evening meal?
Choose what you say at home, even if you use another word formally.
- Dinner
- Tea
- Supper
- Something else
Who says what
Each accent profile in the survey has an expected answer to this question. Where a profile allows more than one answer, the region genuinely varies.
Dinner
Expected in 15 of the survey's accent profiles.
Tea
Expected in 14 of the survey's accent profiles.
Why this question is in the survey
Vocabulary questions like this one are the fastest way to place a speaker, because the answer is a single conscious word choice rather than a sound people cannot hear in themselves. They also travel: a word that splits England into five regions often splits North America into three quite different ones. Every answer is stored with a coarse map cell for the town you grew up in, and a region is coloured in once at least five people there have answered.
See the full question bank, the accent profiles these answers feed, or how the scoring works.