dinner
/ˈdɪnə
/- They receive subsidised breakfast, lunch and dinners if they have to work late.
- You celebrate cozy dinners and candlelight evenings with family and loved ones.
- Our team provides the best quality food to all sizes of events, from corporate dinners to weddings.
- Bacon had to carry on with the reception and dinners in his honour.
Phrases
done like (a) dinner
more —— than someone has had hot dinners
Origin
Middle English: from Old French disner (infinitive used as a noun: see dine).
Our words dine (Middle English) and dinner are both from the same root, Old French desjeuner ‘to have breakfast’, which survives in modern French as déjeuner, ‘lunch’, and petit déjeuner, ‘breakfast’. The root was jëun ‘fasting’, which goes back to Latin jejunus ‘fasting, barren’ found also in jejune (early 17th century) which originally meant ‘without food’ and then ‘not intellectually nourishing’. In Australia, New Zealand, and Canada to be done like a dinner is to be utterly defeated or outwitted—the British equivalent is done like a kipper. The messy and unappetizing appearance of food set out for a dog is behind the expressions a dog's dinner (or breakfast), meaning ‘a poor piece of work’ a mess', and dressed up like a dog's dinner, ‘wearing ridiculously smart or ostentatious clothes’, which date from the 1930s.
Rhymes
- Pitcairnese
- Pitcairn Islands
- pit canal
- pit-cave
- pit cavity
- pitch
- pitchable
- pitch-accented
- pit chamber
- pitch and putt
- pitch and run
- pitch-and-toss
- pitch angle
- pitch axis
- pitch-back
- pitch battle
- pitch bend
- pitch-black
- pitch-blackness
- pitchblende
- pitch block
- pitch-board
- pitch-brown
- pitch-cap
- pitch-capping