Tiffin
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| Part of the Meals series |
| Common meals... |
| Breakfast |
| Second breakfast |
| Elevenses |
| Brunch |
| Tiffin |
| Lunch |
| Tea |
| Dinner |
| Supper |
| Dessert |
| Snack |
| See also... |
Tiffin is an Indian and British term for a light meal eaten during the day. The word became popular in British India, possibly related to tiffing, an English word defined in Francis Grose's 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue as meaning "Eating or drinking out of meal time, disputing or falling out; also lying with a wench, A tiff of punch, a small bowl of punch". According to the Oxford dictionary, the etymology of the word is dubious.
In India, the word is mostly used for light lunches prepared for working Indian men by their wives after they have left for work, and forwarded to them by Dabbawalas who use a complex system to get thousands of tiffin-boxes to their destinations. The lunches are packed in steel or tin boxes, also sometimes called tiffins or tiffin-boxes. A common approach is to put rice in one box, dal in another and yet other items in the third or fourth. The other items could be breads, such as naan, vegetable curry and finally a sweet. This system delivers thousands of meals a day and does not use any documents as many Dabbawalas are illiterate. It has been claimed that the tiffin delivery system of Mumbai is so efficient that there is only one mistake for every million deliveries[1]. Another modern usage of the word also applies to lunches that may be packed by parents for children attending school, to provide a lunch during the school day if the student eats lunch at school.
In some former British colonies, the stacked porcelain or metal round trays with handles are called tiffin carriers (similar to the dabba transported by a Dabbawala), and small-scale caterers use them for delivering meals to individual homes.
People also refer to cups of tea as "a cup of tiffin".
In the film Carry On Up the Khyber, "having a bit of tiffin" is used as a euphemism for sex.
[edit] See also
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