[Ads-l] Origin of "brunch"

[Shapiro, Fred]

Bravo, Ben !  I was the one who contributed the August 1895 citation to the OED, but I have never been able to push it back any further.  Congratulations on your doing so.

Fred


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From: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU> on behalf of Ben Yagoda <byagoda at UDEL.EDU>
Sent: Tuesday, June 3, 2025 10:43 AM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
Subject: Origin of "brunch"

On my blog Not One-Off Britishisms, I recently looked into the origin of “brunch." I already knew and had written that it originated in late nineteenth-century England, with heavy American use starting in the 1920s and ‘30s, but only last week did I discover that, if Google something like “origin of the word brunch,” you will get a bunch of articles that make the same claim. Here’s how Google’s AI puts it:

“The word ‘brunch’ is a combination of ‘breakfast' and ‘lunch’. It was first used in 1895 by Guy Beringer in an article for Hunter’s Weekly. Beringer suggested it as an alternative to the traditional heavy post-church Sunday meal, proposing a lighter, more sociable meal eaten around noon.”

The claim seems credible because, as a number of the articles report, someone wrote in Punch in August 1896: “To be fashionable nowadays we must ‘brunch’. Truly an excellent portmanteau word, introduced, by the way, last year, by Mr. Guy Beringer, in the now defunct Hunter’s Weekly, and indicating a combined breakfast and lunch.”

But the OED shows that Punch and the Internet are wrong, as it dates the Beringer article to November 1895 and has this quote from the U.S. newspaper The Independent in August 1895: “Breakfast is ‘brekker’ in the Oxford tongue; when a man makes lunch his first meal of the day it becomes ‘brunch’.”

After spending some time on Google Books, I found another 1895 example, this one in a book called "Giddy Oxon. An Eights Week Dialogue, and Other Pieces." The quote comes from an arch (the whole thing is arch) dramatic piece called “Men’s Badgerings.” A character called Strurt says: "I don't have lunch. I have brunch. Brunch is a combination of brekker and lunch; it's more artistic. It allows me to lie in bed, and it keeps down my battles."

The book itself doesn’t indicate the month of publication, and I wasn't able to find any record of or reference to "Giddy Oxon," so I published a post with a plea to readers for any information about it.

https://nam12.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fnotoneoffbritishisms.com%2F2025%2F05%2F28%2Flets-do-brunch%2F%23comments&data=05%7C02%7Cfred.shapiro%40YALE.EDU%7C05a58ce332fc49e9f9b708dda2ad0b7d%7Cdd8cbebb21394df8b4114e3e87abeb5c%7C0%7C0%7C638845586302011896%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&sdata=OirKjrVVnvCGXwzlDpfjJCAY21Vb6vrly%2BZfJrXmkq4%3D&reserved=0<https://notoneoffbritishisms.com/2025/05/28/lets-do-brunch/#comments>

Remarkably, within an hour, Hugh Waterhouse posted a comment that he had found an article in the May 28, 1895, edition of the Western Morning News concerning happenings at Oxford, which included this quote : “Eights’ week literature is well to the fore this year, and is evidenced in two short-lived publications, “Giddy Oxon” and the “Octopus”. They are both well up to the standard of such evanoescent [sic] literature,…” Hugh also explained that “eights week” is “the week in the year when student rowing eights compete in races to be crowned ‘Head of the River’.”

Bottom line, “brunch” was used as early as May 1895, three months before the OED‘s first citation.

Ben Yagoda

Linktree of published pieces: https://nam12.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flinktr.ee%2Fbenyagoda&data=05%7C02%7Cfred.shapiro%40YALE.EDU%7C05a58ce332fc49e9f9b708dda2ad0b7d%7Cdd8cbebb21394df8b4114e3e87abeb5c%7C0%7C0%7C638845586302036507%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&sdata=gB18LaP1u76Bawp2eMQ9E5IpkIgFWZ43bXZe6MRAYRY%3D&reserved=0<https://linktr.ee/benyagoda>

Website: benyagoda.blog

“The Lives They’re Living” podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-lives-theyre-living/id1744211348

Just out: “Gobsmacked! The British Invasion of American English” (Princeton University Press)
https://nam12.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fbookshop.org%2Fa%2F108735%2F9780691262291&data=05%7C02%7Cfred.shapiro%40YALE.EDU%7C05a58ce332fc49e9f9b708dda2ad0b7d%7Cdd8cbebb21394df8b4114e3e87abeb5c%7C0%7C0%7C638845586302050824%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&sdata=O45eb1rxjTzV7z8vphBlXQL50EVufj5iDqcmJK9LnwY%3D&reserved=0<https://bookshop.org/a/108735/9780691262291>











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