For what must be the 10th time in the last few months, I was doing the Sunday crossword puzzle and they had "dine" as the definition and "sup" for the answer. Sometimes it's the other way around.

One might suppose [he said with a supercilious sneer] that anyone who knows words knows that dinner and supper are not the same meal. When Jonathan Harker arrived chez Dracula, the count told him, "I have already dined and I do not sup."

Dinner has been at different times of the day in different ages and cultures. In 14th century Florence, it was in the late morning (cf. The Decameron where Bocaccio tells of the merry troupe dining in the late morning, then going for a nap), to mid-day (common among rural people and farm families to this day), to late afternoon, about 5:00 (common in cities and towns even now), to early evening (the classic Victorian dinner party had dinner at about 8:00) to late evening (dinner in Spain today is not served earler than 10:00).

Supper, however, always has been an evening meal. In Jane Austen and Victorian novels, supper follows a ball, and is served around midnight and is more of a collation than a meal. The word comes from the French souper which is in turn from soupe and indicates that supper was, in former times, a relatively light meal featuring soup and had the function of tiding you over for the night, your main meal of the day having been earlier.

And what other words for meals? A wedding breakfast, in British usage (it isn't used in the U.S.) may be in the afternoon if the wedding is not in the morning. Is the verb lunch used as commonly outside the U.S. as it is here? And then there's the vast subject of tea. And "elevenses". .... Do y'all in the UK do much other than eat?