breakfast

Medieval Christians fasted overnight as a matter of religious discipline, and the first meal of the day broke that fast. The word breakfast is first recorded in English in 1463, in a letter from John Paston of Norfolk mentioning a brekfast. Its two halves, break from Old English brecan and fast from Old English fæstan meaning to abstain from food, were roots joined into a compound during the Middle English period.

Before breakfast settled into use, Middle English speakers said morrowmeat or simply the morning meal. The word disner, which became dinner, originally meant the midday meal eaten after the morning fast was broken, from Old French disjeuner, itself meaning to break the fast. French kept that compound logic and eventually produced déjeuner, still the standard word for breakfast in French today. English and French both built words from the same concept but applied them to different meals.

The meal itself was not always the first a household ate in a formal sense. Until the 17th century, many working people took bread and ale before dawn without calling it a named occasion. The concept of breakfast as a social event emerged with the prosperity of the 17th and 18th centuries, when middling and upper households developed elaborate morning spreads and domestic manuals began dedicating chapters to their arrangement.

The Industrial Revolution compressed breakfast sharply. Factory shifts required workers at six in the morning, and the meal contracted to something grabbed before departure. The great Victorian breakfast, with its kedgeree and kippers and cold meats, was a staging of domestic ease that factory workers aspired to and mill owners actually ate. The fast that named the meal had become, by the 1850s, less about religion than about the working day's first pause.