North China has 3 meals a day,with a summer fruit snack mid-afternoon

@axsvl77 - OOC, by "North China" do you mean "roughly Yellow River valley vs. Yangtze valley", or do you mean Manchuria?

A clarification: "Dinner" is not a time-dependent meal, it's just the largest or "main" meal of the day - be that at Lunch or Supper (or even Breakfast!) When people became more likely to eat a quick lunch at work then a big meal in the evening, it did start to be more common as Supper than Lunch though.

Thought I should point out "BBQ" is not remotely related to this. Nor is "Feast". Those are types of meals. You would say e.g. "We are having BBQ for dinner"

True, I just added them so they wouldn't be discussed :)

@Chronocidal That's a use of the term, but, at least these days, isn't universal. For instance, the Harvard Dialect Survey's question on dinner vs. supper features just over ⅓ of people in the US saying that dinner is the same as supper, ~⅓ of people in the US saying that they never use the word supper, and under ⅓ of people in the US distinguishing between dinner and supper.

@LancePollard - While this Okie totally agrees with you, I went to Canada once and was invited somewhere for BBQ, to discover to my grave disappointment that this was just their term for a meal where the meat was prepared by grilling, and in fact they were just serving grilled hotdogs and hamburgers at their "BBQ". So it appears that what is meant by that word is in fact regional. (I mean, you all in Canada are wrong, but I'll grudgingly acknowledge your right to collectively be wrong)

@Chronocidal Your comment confuses me. If lunch was the largest meal in your day, are you saying you'd call it "dinner"? I'm also confused by the idea that "quick lunch[es]" supplanted big meals in the evening ... did people not used to eat lunch? I would think that a quick lunch would entail a big meal, not the other way around.

@LuckyKleinschmidt That varies regionally. In the Southern United States, 'BBQ' can refer to the occasion rather than just the particular process of cooking. Bringing home cooked meat for dinner is not a BBQ by that definition. Some people have rather strong opinions about this. It is more comparable to 'feast' in this sense.

@AzorAhai Yes, historically a midday meal was referred to as 'dinner' if it was to be the largest meal. This confused me when I read "To Kill A Mockingbird", IIRC.

@Tashus Ah, but Chronocidal said "is not" so I was curious if that was still true for them.

Not all areas of the Anglosphere use the same terms. In my British house the three meals are breakfast, dinner, tea.

"potentially eating at most 1-time in a day" 24 hours is the time when stomach is not growling anymore, so that's unlikely.

@T.E.D. The yellow river areas, aka the "North China Plain". I think the most of the rest of the country is this way too, but don't know well enough to say.

@AzorAhai Correct: The 3 main meal times are Breakfast, Lunch and Supper. The largest meal is "Dinner". (Think "Christmas Dinner", or having a "Roast Dinner" for a traditional Sunday Lunch)

@chronocidal Where do you live? "Christmas Dinner" is a dinner to me and I don't have Roast Dinners so I don't have an interpretation for that

Here's a referential circle for you... southernliving.com/culture/supper-vs-dinner Even Southern Living is citing StackExchange now! Just my guess here that this may have something to do with farming culture... When you have to stop, come in out of the field, and wash up to have a sit-down meal, you can't have too many in a day. Morning and evening you're cleaned up anyway, then just one in the middle to keep you going.