What do you call your evening meal? I mapped 12,522 answers to that question from the Our Dialects survey, drew the line where tea gives way to dinner, and asked whether dinner is taking over.
Ask someone in Lancashire what is for tea and they will tell you about the evening meal. Ask the same question in Surrey and you may be offered a cup and a biscuit. Britain has three words for the last proper meal of the day, and the choice says where you grew up, and perhaps how old you are, more clearly than almost anything else you say.
The Our Dialects project at the University of Manchester has asked people across the UK since 2013 what they call their evening meal, with three options: dinner, tea or supper. Its public map holds 12,555 answers, each placed at the person's postcode district, with their age and the year they answered. I smoothed them into a map, drew the line where tea and dinner are level, and tested what really predicts the word: place, age, gender or year.
Brown means tea leads, blue means dinner leads, and the paler the colour the closer the split. The black line is the tea line: the line where the two words are level after smoothing. Search for a town, village or postcode district to see what people say there, or tap the map anywhere. Switch to the hexagons to see the counts behind the colour (only hexagons with at least 10 answers are shown).
The split is as clean as anything in British dialect. Across the three northern regions of England, 75% of 5,817 answers say tea. Across London, the South East, the East of England and the South West, 74% of 3,669 say dinner. The Midlands are the borderland, split almost exactly down the middle: 49% tea and 48% dinner.
The tea line itself runs north from the Severn estuary past Gloucester and Worcester, swings round the west and north of Birmingham, which sits just on the dinner side, then heads east past Derby and Nottingham, with Leicester on the dinner side, to the Wash. Wales sits mostly on the tea side: 57% of 423 Welsh answers say tea. Northern Ireland says dinner (79% of 220), and so, mostly, does Scotland (61% of 515), with Glasgow firmly dinner and the east coast closer to tea. Those three nations have far fewer answers than England, so their maps are broader brush.
London has the least tea on the map: only 7% of 870 answers, against 87% dinner. Lancashire is one of the most tea: 80% of 846. The East Riding of Yorkshire (81%) and Lancashire top the list of counties with at least 30 answers; Greater London and Hertfordshire are at the bottom, and Hertfordshire edges London for dinner (88%).
The argument is not really about the evening meal. It is about dinner. In the old pattern, still alive across the north, the Midlands and much of Wales, dinner is the main meal of the day, and it is eaten in the middle of the day. That is why schools have dinner ladies and why the midday break is dinner time. The evening meal is tea, a cooked meal eaten when people come home from work, and supper, if it happens at all, is a snack before bed. The Oxford English Dictionary puts it plainly: tea is "a light meal in the late afternoon, but locally in the U.K. (esp. northern) ... a cooked evening meal".
So a Lancashire family eating dinner at noon and tea at six and a Surrey family eating lunch at one and dinner at seven are on the same timetable with different names. The southern pattern, with dinner moved to the evening, started among the well off, who ate later and later from the eighteenth century onwards, and spread outwards. Kate Fox, in Watching the English, treats the words as a class marker as much as a regional one.
Every English region north of the Midlands has a tea majority of more than seven in ten. Every region south of it has a dinner majority, though the South West (35% tea) is warmer to tea than the South East (18%), with patches of tea in Somerset, Gloucestershire and Cornwall.
Younger people say dinner more often than older people, but only in some places. Across the south of England, 79% of answers from people aged 18 to 24 say dinner, against 57% from those aged 50 to 64. In a logistic regression that also allows for region, survey year and gender, the odds of saying dinner fall by a factor of 0.79 for every ten years of age in the south (95% interval 0.74 to 0.84, p < 0.001). The Midlands show a smaller slope (0.91, p = 0.005) and so does Scotland (0.81, p = 0.001).
The north does not move. There, 24% of 18 to 24 year olds and 21% of 50 to 64 year olds say dinner, and the age slope is indistinguishable from flat (0.97, p = 0.22). The difference between the north and south slopes is itself clear (likelihood ratio test, p < 0.001). Tea in the north looks as secure among teenagers as among their grandparents.
An age gap is not proof of change: people may switch words as they grow up, leave home or move, and younger people in the south may have learned "dinner" from parents who already used it. The survey also runs for twelve years, so I checked whether dinner has grown from 2013 to 2024. It has not. With answers reweighted to the same mix of region and age every year, dinner's share moves between 41% and 50% with no upward trend, and in the regression the odds of dinner, if anything, fall slightly with survey year (0.97 a year, p < 0.001). Twelve years is short for a word to move, and the people answering in each year are not the same kind of sample, so this is weak evidence either way.
Gender makes no difference: 52% of women and 52% of men say tea. Place does nearly all the work. Region on its own explains 97% of what a model can explain about dinner against tea (pseudo R² 0.19); age, gender and year together add almost nothing (pseudo R² 0.007 without region).
Supper is the minority answer: 447 answers, 3.6% of the total. It is commonest in the South West (8.4%), the South East (7.0%) and London (6.6%), and rarest across the north of England, where supper is the late snack. Its strongest pull is age. In the south, 20% of answers from people aged 65 and over say supper, against 6% of those aged 18 to 24, and across the UK the odds of supper rise by a factor of 1.34 for every ten years of age (p < 0.001). Supper leads the smoothed map in only one small area, in Aberdeenshire, where 11 of 32 answers say it.
In 2018 YouGov asked more than 42,000 adults in England what they call their evening meal: 57% said dinner, 36% tea and 5% supper. The raw survey answers from England look quite different: 44% dinner and 53% tea. The reason is who answered. A third of the English answers (33%) come from the North West, the survey's home region, which holds 13% of England's people; London gives 8% of answers but holds 16% of the population.
Reweight the adult answers in each region to the region's share of England's population (Census 2021) and the survey gives 55% dinner, 40% tea and 5% supper, within a few points of YouGov on every word. The county rankings agree too. YouGov's three most dinner counties, East Sussex, Essex and Kent, are 4th, 3rd and 7th of the 45 English counties with at least 30 answers here; its three most tea counties, Greater Manchester, Tyne and Wear and Merseyside, are 12th, 3rd and 6th for tea.
YouGov also split its answers by social grade. In the north, 58% of middle-class people said tea and 67% of working-class people; in the south, 74% of middle-class and 70% of working-class people said dinner. Class tilts the word a little; region tilts it a lot. The Our Dialects survey does not ask about class, so I cannot test that here. Its own site text reports London as 89% dinner and 3% tea, from an earlier count; the full 2013 to 2024 answers give 87% and 7%.
Volunteers, not a sample. Anyone could answer, and the survey is run from Manchester: 46% of all answers (51% of English ones) come from the north of England, and 59% come from people under 25 (median age 22). The smoothing follows the answers, so the map is sharpest where the survey was popular. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have only 515, 423 and 220 answers.
One question, three options. The survey asks about the evening meal only, with dinner, tea and supper to choose from. People who use two words, or say "lunch" and "dinner" but "tea" on Sundays, must pick one. There is no question about the midday meal.
Where people live, roughly. Each answer is placed at a postcode district, not an address, and the survey does not say whether that is where the person grew up.
Copyright. The answers belong to the Our Dialects project and are not openly licensed. I publish only counts for hexagons, counties, regions and postcode areas with at least 10 answers, and smoothed maps. For the answers themselves, see the project's own map.
Answers. 12,555 answers from the Our Dialects meal map, read from the project's public web map in 2026, each with a postcode district point, survey year, age and gender. 33 answers from the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man were left out. Each answer was placed in a county and an ONS region.
Smoothing and the tea line. Answers were counted on a 2 km grid by word and smoothed with a Gaussian kernel. The width was chosen by leave-one-cell-out prediction from 4 to 32 km; 16 km predicted best. Where fewer than 10 weighted answers were within reach the width was widened smoothly towards 24 and 32 km, and cells still short were left blank. Each word's share is its smoothed count over the total, pulled very slightly towards the national share. The tea line is where the smoothed shares of tea and dinner are equal. Halving or doubling the kernel width leaves the leading word unchanged at 96% and 96% of answer locations.
Models. Logistic regressions of dinner against tea (supper answers left out) on age in decades, survey year, gender and region, fitted for all answers and separately for each part of the UK; and of supper against everything else. The north against south difference in age slope is a likelihood ratio test of an age by area interaction. Year trends are also shown with each year's answers reweighted to the overall mix of region and age group.
YouGov check. Adult answers from each English region weighted to the region's share of England's population in the 2021 Census, and compared with YouGov's published 2018 figures.