Dictionary

severe tea en · NOUN

Meanings

1. (archaic) A large evening meal, less formal than dinner, typically including various cooked foods served with tea.
   • Darkness had set in, and we could only wend our not too weary way to the comfortable "Commercial Hotel," where we gathered around that most attractive of all travel-endings, at least after seven p.m., the tea-table, complemented by what is included in the hunger-edged phrase "a severe tea". 1889, William Westgarth, Half a Century of Australasian Progress, page 34:
   • We had a capital "severe tea" at Robin Hood's Bay in a sweet little old-fashioned inn, with a bow-window right over the seaweed-covered rocks of the strand. I believe we would have shocked the "New Woman" with our appetites. 1897, Bram Stoker, Dracula, Chartwell Books, published 2024, →ISBN, page 90:
   • Now and then he gets an invitation to dinner, sometimes to tea. Not a kettle-drum before dinner, mark you — an invention that had not yet reached Meadowleigh — but a severe tea of the substantial sort. 1863, Anne Manning, Meadowleigh: A Tale of English Country Life, page 305:
   • Heard Lady Mary, as I left her room yesterday, say to her sympathizing maid, "I shall keep a strict fast and take no dinner to-day." Felt pleased, as in general her appetite is sinfully good; but she added, in a tone of mournful reflection: "Tell Mrs. Jobson to send me a severe tea at six, with fried sole, omelette, muffins, poached eggs, scolloped oysters, and several kinds of preserves." 1853, Catherine Sinclair, “The Priest and the Curate”, in London Homes: including The Murder Hole; The Drowning Dragoon; The Priest and the Curate; Lady Mary Pierrepoint; & Frank Vansittart, page 29:

Forms