lunch
Meanings
Plural: lunches
Noun
- a midday meal
- A light meal usually eaten around midday, notably when not as main meal of the day.
- A break in play between the first and second sessions.
- Any small meal, especially one eaten at a social gathering.
- A thin piece or hunk (of bread, meat, etc.)
Verb
- take the midday meal
- "At what time are you lunching?"
- provide a midday meal for
- "She lunched us well"
- To eat lunch.
- To treat to lunch.
Origin / Etymology
Recorded since 1580 in the sense “piece, hunk”. The word luncheon with the same meaning is presumably an extension on the pattern of puncheon (“cask”) and truncheon (“cudgel”). But earliest found forms include lunshin and lunching, which are equivalent to lunch + -ing, with the suffix -ing possibly later modified to imitate a French origin.
The sense “light meal” is first attested for luncheon in 1652 and for lunch in 1829, so in this sense the latter is probably a shortening of the former.
Lunch is possibly a derivative of lump (as hunch is from hump. See hunch for more), or represents an alteration of nuncheon, from Middle English nonechenche (“light midday meal”) (see nuncheon) and altered by northern English dialect lunch (“hunk of bread or cheese”) (1590), which perhaps is from lump or from Spanish lonja (“a slice”, literally “loin”).
Scrabble Score: 10
lunch is a valid Scrabble (US) TWL wordlunch is a valid Scrabble Word in Merriam-Webster MW Dictionary
lunch is a valid Scrabble Word in International Collins CSW Dictionary