обед - lunch or dinner?

How does one determine when обед is dinner and when it refers to lunch?

Dinner is something between the breakfast and supper. :) Apart from that it's hard to tell anything more precise. :)

Different people have different eating patterns. In general breakfast is a "morning" meal (before work/school or at least before midday), dinner is a second meal - usually at 1-3 p.m. (at work it's called "обеденный перерыв"), supper is an evening meal after work/school, usually it's taken after 6 p.m.

There's no lunch as a rule. I'm not sure even when it's supposed to be. Many people snack on something between meals, but there's no system in it or a particular time. They just grab something from the fridge when they are hungry, and the breakfast/dinner/supper isn't cooked yet.

There's also such thing as misterious "полдник" (a meal at noon). But it seems a tradition to have "полдники" survived only in kindergartens and sanatoriums. :)

For me обед is any meal between 2 and 6 PM. Excluding unserious food - like apple, tea or other.
The dinner was обед if after that you had your supper. Другими словами, when it happened that you had two dinners before your supper, then your first обед was actually your lunch.

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Originally Posted by gRomoZeka

There's also such thing as misterious "полдник"

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О... Как много в этом слове (c) :lol:
Сразу столько всяких ассоциаций вызвало... :)

This question is flawed because each country has there own traditions and varried meal times. Even in English meal vocabularly is ambigious. In Northern England "dinner" is a meal during the day and "tea" is an evening meal.

Also in standard British English a lunch at school is a "school dinner".

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Originally Posted by gRomoZeka

Dinner is something between the breakfast and supper. :) Apart from that it's hard to tell anything more precise. :)

Different people have different eating patterns. In general breakfast is a "morning" meal (before work/school or at least before midday), dinner is a second meal - usually at 1-3 p.m. (at work it's called "обеденный перерыв"), supper is an evening meal after work/school, usually it's taken after 6 p.m.

There's no lunch as a rule. I'm not sure even when it's supposed to be. Many people snack on something between meals, but there's no system in it or a particular time. They just grab something from the fridge when they are hungry, and the breakfast/dinner/supper isn't cooked yet.

There's also such thing as misterious "полдник" (a meal at noon). But it seems a tradition to have "полдники" survived only in kindergartens and sanatoriums. :)

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This is very interesting and different from what I have in this part of the world. Your examples are very good. What do you think about the other examples found in Lingvo:
закрыто на обед — closed for lunch
перед обедом — before lunch; (до полудня) in the morning
после обеда — after lunch; (после полудня) in the afternoon

Would обед lean more towards a mid-day meal? And ужин a late evening /night meal? Завтрак is pretty standard, basically a morning meal after waking up from sleep at night.

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Originally Posted by tohca

Would обед lean more towards a mid-day meal? And ужин a late evening /night meal?

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Exactly.

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Рано или поздно я добьюсь успехов в русском языке.

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Thanks for the all the input. For meal times in my part of the world, which includes Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, Brunei and Malaysia, we have 6 different meal times. Three major meals which are breakfast (6-9 AM), lunch (12 - 2 PM) and dinner (6 - 9 PM). And three other minor meals, morning tea, afternoon tea and supper. And believe me, the majority of Malaysians do eat 6 meals a day! We are as close to a gourmet paradise as you can get. :lol:

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Originally Posted by Оля

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Рано или поздно я добьюсь успехов в русском языке.

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Спасибо!

I find this is confusing to many American students because we have breakfast, lunch, and dinner (also called supper).

Also, supper seems to have a different connotation (at least in North Easter America) than dinner.

TATY, exactly.

In Spanish there is no "lunch", just breakfast and dinner. Well, there is "almorzar", but no one uses it. )))

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Originally Posted by Yazeed

In Spanish there is no "lunch", just breakfast and dinner.

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The same in Russian, by the way.