Dinnertime

There can be a certain malleability in the terms used for meals. Where I come from, dinner is the evening meal, but it's the afternoon meal in the Boston area. French French has petit déjeuner, déjeuner, dîner over the course of the day while Belgian French has déjeuner, dîner, souper. In both of these cases, meal names have shifted over by *one* meal, between afternoon and evening, or between morning and afternoon.

Today's A Word A Day offering is "jentacular", "relating to breakfast". It comes "from Latin jentare (to breakfast)". I immediately recognized this as the source of Portuguese "jantar", the evening meal. This is quite a leap. At some point in the written record between Latin and modern Portuguese, does this word stop in the middle for some period of time and refer to the afternoon meal?

Now, I've posed the question just as a curiosity because I went on to check out the story of "dîner" and found that a similar story is indeed recorded for it. I realized that I didn't know the origin of "dinner"/French "dîner", and in particular I wondered whether the circumflex in the French word indicates a lost "s". Well, the Trésor de la langue française informatisé (TLFi) confirms my suspicion that it comes from the same source as "déjeuner" and Spanish "desayuno" (breakfast): "disjejunare", to break a fast, from "jejunare", to fast. TLFi explains the derivation of dîner through a haplology "disjunare", and attests a use from around 1131, "[Al matin monte]... quant ont disné li noble chevalier)" (with the "s" that the circumflex would later stand in for) where it refers to the morning meal, followed by an attestation in 1532, "qu'il luy aprestast au lendemain, sur le midy, à disner", where it referred to the afternoon meal, and finally one before 1747, "Mon maître donne à dîner ce soir", where it referred to the evening meal. Very fluid.

Did "dinner" ever mean "breakfast" in English?
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