From the mid fourteenth to the late sixteenth century, the repast we now call lunch was known not as luncheon but as nuncheon. The word nuncheon developed from noon schenche, the word schenche having derived from an Old English word meaning drink. A noon schenche, therefore, was literally a drink taken at noon, though naturally a bit of food came to be eaten with it as well. (Incidentally, the Old English schenche is related to the word shin, probably because the shinbones of animals were once used as pipes to draw drinks from barrels; likewise, the Latin word for shinbone\u2014tibia\u2014was sometimes used by the ancient Romans to denote a musical pipe or flute.) In the late sixteenth century, two synonyms for nuncheon appeared at almost the same time, lunch and luncheon. The fact that luncheon seems to have been formed by combining lunch and nuncheon suggests that lunch is the source of luncheon and not the other way around. Lunch, in fact, seems to have developed from the word lump in the same way that hunch, as in hunchback, derived from hump; a lunch was therefore originally a lump of food or\u2014as the eighteenth-century lexicographer, Samuel Johnson, more precisely defined it\u2014as much food as one hand can hold. At the same time, the development of lunch from lump may have been helped along by the existence of a Spanish word, lonja, meaning slice: the first recorded use of lunch in English, in fact, is as a direct translation of lonja in the Spanish phrase lonja de tocino, which we would now translate as slice of bacon.<\/p>\n
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From the mid fourteenth to the late sixteenth century, the repast we now call lunch was known not as luncheon but as nuncheon. The word nuncheon developed from noon schenche, the word schenche having derived from an Old English word meaning drink. A noon schenche, therefore, was literally a drink taken at noon, though naturally […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40566","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-l"],"yoast_head":"\n