Meaning of severe tea | Babel Free

Definitions

A large evening meal, less formal than dinner, typically including various cooked foods served with tea.

archaic

Examples

“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."”

“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.”

“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".”

“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.”

CEFR level