Why packed 'lunch' but school 'dinner'?
Question
If you take your own lunch to school, it’s called a packed lunch. If you pay to have it at school, it’s called school dinners. But it’s the same meal, so why does it have two names?
Elise, aged 9
Answer
** Definitive **
Name: Peter, Bow
Qualification: I’m cockney!
Answer: Working class people have always called a meal “a dinner”. So if you have a meal in the middle of the day, they would say “I had a dinner”. In the evening, they would also call it “a dinner”.
** Even more definitive **
Name: Ian, Edgware
Qualification: It’s from Larusse Gastronomique, a French cooking dictionary
Answer: Lunch is a corruption of a 19th century French word, which means cold meal at midday. Dinner is a hot meal at midday.