I hope that clears things up.

Not really. You had me in the first half, tho.

Dinner, as the main meal, used to be closer to midday in agrarian times, with the evening meal being a light supper. Only the industrial revolution, with workers spending most of the working day in the workplace, changed this.

Then there’s high tea, which yes, features tea. Often a pot and almost never a mug. It frequently comes with anemic sandwiches and perhaps a scone.

Wrong way round.

High tea is/was the working class term for an evening meal as it was had at the table, and it would usually include cooked meat.

Afternoon tea is the posh one in the afternoon with the cucumber sandwiches with the crusts cut off.

British people:

And there's tea time, which is dinner, and also tee time, which is a golfing thing.

And there's also the long dark tea time of the soul, which is a book by Douglas Adams

Terrible example and it's just demonstrating that you can't put yourself in someone else's shoes for even a moment.

You understand that usage of tea because you used it your entire life, someone who hasn't would rightfully be confused.

bruh because it's confusing that a meal is named after a beverage, it's not the double naming that's confusing

But when my Irish friend wants to smoke a cigarette, everybody loses their fucking mind.

Careful with that kind of thinking! If you don't watch out, you risk entering Salad Theory territory 😬

Offer of a hot beverage:

• Would you like a tea?
• How about a tea?
• (Shouting from kitchen) - Tea?

Even less ambiguous if cuppa/brew etc. is used Typically only offered in the morning or afternoon if you have just 'popped round'.

Offer of dinner:

• Would you like to stay for tea?
• Come round mine for tea
• Have you had tea yet?
• Oh you should stay for tea

Typically if you you weren't intending on staying or are being explicitly invited over.

Don't see how any of this could be confusing at all to people not born into it with innate understanding 😅

Very common in the UK too. Lunch is dinner, dinner is dinner, dinner is tea, tea is also a specific type of afternoon meal (scones and sandwiches).
Even then, people will just say something like 'morning tea' instead of breakfast.
It's a linguistic war zone.

Back in the day, the noon/midday meal was called dinner also in the US. Particularly in rural areas. And for some of us boomers it's still dinner. Growing up on a farm, Breakfast was 6am-ish thing after chores were done, (you could sneak in some jelly toast before chores if you weren't to lazy to get up early enough), the noon dinner, and you always came home to eat it, was a full meal deal because you had spent your morning often doing heavy manual labor. Plus your afternoon was going to be no different. You got lunch a 4pm because supper was a 7pm-ish meal, (often heavy on the "ish" part depending on what went wrong during the afternoon).

We evidently didn't get the memo about changing dinner to lunch until much, much later. Besides, we would have needed to rename "lunch" to something else for the 4pm break. I still call the noon meal dinner to this day. You can call it whatever you like, because I don't sweat those details.

What the fuck.
Have never heard anyone call lunch anything other than that, unless it is a tradie who might say 'smoko' for lunch or a 15 minute snack break.

Aussie terms for meals:
Breakfast/brekkie
Morning tea/smoko*
Lunch (or brunch if its ~9-11am)
Afternoon tea/arvo tea*
Dinner/Tea
Dessert/Sweets*

*morning/arvo tea are primarily for social sit downs and would be like biscuits/scones and a cup of tea/coffee (having a cuppa with friends/family, small meetings with clients, retirees with nothing better to do)

• dessert/sweets is if your having something after dinner, like some pie/crumble with ice cream, pancakes, etc)

Also 'entree' is a small course before the main meal in dinner, the USA confused the fuck out of me when i visited.

While you sit on your tuffit?