Breakfast is the first meal of the day usually eaten in the morning. The word in English refers to breaking the fasting period of the previous night. Various "typical" or "traditional" breakfast menus exist, with food choices varying by regions and traditions worldwide.

The English word "dinner" (from Old French disner) also referred originally to breaking a fast; until its meaning shifted in the mid-13th century it was the name given to the first meal of the day. The tradition of eating a morning meal has existed since ancient times, though it was not until the 15th century that "breakfast" came into use in written English as a calque of dinner to describe a morning meal: literally a breaking of the fasting period of the night just ended. In Old English the term had been morgenmete, literally "morning food."

Brunch is a meal eaten between 10:00 a.m. and 12:00 p.m, sometimes accompanied by alcoholic drinks (typically champagne or a cocktail). The word brunch is a portmanteau of breakfast and lunch. Brunch originated in England in the late 19th century, and became popular in the United States in the 1930s.

The 1896 supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary cites Punch magazine, which wrote that the term was coined in Britain in 1895 to describe a Sunday meal for "Saturday-night carousers" in the writer Guy Beringer's article "Brunch: A Plea"[6] in Hunter's Weekly.[7][8]

Instead of England's early Sunday dinner, a postchurch ordeal of heavy meats and savory pies, the author wrote, why not a new meal, served around noon, that starts with tea or coffee, marmalade and other breakfast fixtures before moving along to the heavier fare

By eliminating the need to get up early on Sunday, brunch would make life brighter for Saturday-night carousers. It would promote human happiness in other ways as well.

"Brunch is cheerful, sociable and inciting", Beringer wrote. "It is talk-compelling. It puts you in a good temper, it makes you satisfied with yourself and your fellow beings, it sweeps away the worries and cobwebs of the week."

— William Grimes, "At Brunch, the More Bizarre the Better" New York Times, 1998 Despite the substantially later date, it has also been claimed that the term was possibly coined by reporter Frank Ward O'Malley, who wrote in the early 20th century for the New York newspaperThe Sun from 1906 until 1919.[10] It's thought that he may have come up with the term after observing the typical mid-day eating habits of his colleagues at the newspaper.