Brunch

How to spell brunch

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce brunch

What does brunch mean?

1. nounA meal eaten in the late morning that combines breakfast and lunch.

Brunch in a sentence

• We booked a table for brunch at the new cafe on Sunday.

• The hotel serves a lavish weekend brunch with pastries and eggs.

Where does brunch come from?

Language of origin: Other

Brunch is a portmanteau, a word made by fusing the start of 'breakfast' with the end of 'lunch'. It first appeared in British slang in the 1890s; the writer Guy Beringer is usually credited with coining it in an 1895 magazine piece arguing for a relaxed late-morning meal to replace the heavy Sunday breakfast. The idea was a sociable, leisurely meal eaten between the two regular mealtimes, and the playful blended spelling stuck because it instantly told you both halves of the joke. It crossed the Atlantic and became firmly fashionable in twentieth-century America, where weekend brunch grew into a whole dining ritual. The spelling is mercifully phonetic, which is why most writers find it an easy word despite its slangy origins.

How the word is built

• br- (from breakfast)
• -unch (from lunch); a blend word combining the two meal names