The Word Soup

  What is Breakfast? Ok, that’s an easy question with an easy answer. Breakfast is the first meal of the day. People have spent irretrievable hours arguing about what constitutes ‘breakfast food’ but we all mostly agree that breakfast itself is the morning meal or at the very least it's the first food of the day even if it’s not full meal. Cool, but where does the word breakfast come from? Well, in English we can break the word down pretty easily. Breakfast.   Break fast.   To break one’s fast.   Fasting Breaking This actually makes a lot of sense since sleep is often the longest period of time we don’t eat. So in the minds of English speakers hundreds of years ago, you were indeed breaking your fast with the first thing you ate in the morning.   This is a pretty straightforward but what’s really nifty is that you can see this same formation in other European languages. Spanish des + ayuno el desayuno ‘un’ ‘fast’ Catalan des de...