Dinner, Tea or Supper? What Britain Calls Its Evening Meal: Mapping 12,522 Answers from the Our Dialects Survey

The evening meal has three names in British English: dinner, tea and supper. I map 12,522 answers to the question "what do you call your evening meal?" from the Our Dialects survey (2013 to 2024), each placed at a postcode district with the respondent's age, gender and year of answer. Answers were smoothed with a Gaussian kernel whose width (16 km) was chosen by cross-validation, and the "tea line" was drawn where the smoothed shares of tea and dinner are equal. The divide is sharp: 75% of answers from the north of England say tea and 74% of answers from the south say dinner, with the Midlands split evenly. Wales leans to tea (57%); Scotland (61%) and Northern Ireland (79%) to dinner. In logistic regressions, younger respondents in the south of England are more likely to say dinner (odds ratio 0.79 per decade of age, p < 0.001), but there is no age gradient in the north (0.97, p = 0.22), and no rise in dinner across twelve survey years. Supper (3.6%) is a word of older, southern respondents. Reweighted to regional populations, the survey reproduces YouGov's 2018 figures for England within a few points. The survey asks only about the evening meal, so the northern use of dinner for the midday meal is described from the literature rather than measured. Interactive version: https://maps.tristanhotham.com/dinner-or-tea/. Data and code: https://github.com/Tristan-Hotham/dinner-or-tea. Survey answers © the Our Dialects project (University of Manchester), used with credit; only aggregates are published.