Meaning

noun a midday meal

verb take the midday meal

verb provide a midday meal for

originRecorded since 1580 in the sense “piece, hunk”. The word luncheon with the same meaning is presumably an extension on the pattern of puncheon (“cask”) and truncheon (“cudgel”). But earliest found forms of luncheon include lunshin and lunching, which are equivalent to lunch + -ing, with the suffix -ing possibly later modified to imitate a French origin. In contrast, the more common sense “light…

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 3.0