dinner

dinner, banquet, feast are comparable when denoting an elaborate meal that is served to guests or to a group (as of members of a club or association) and that often marks some special occasion (as an anniversary) or honors a particular person.

Dinner which basically means the chief meal of the day is the most general of these terms; it is appropriately used of any elaborate and formal meal served to guests or to a group and is the preferred term for use in invitations and in colorless reference to such an affair

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popular as a speaker at public dinners

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planned a birthday dinner for her cousin

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worn out by state dinners and receptions

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Typically, banquet suggests the sumptuousness of the meal, the magnificence of its setting, and often the ceremonial character of the occasion and entertainment

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a certain rigid decorum between guest and geisha is invariably preserved at a Japanese banquet— H earn

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entreating him, his captains, and brave knights, to grace a banquet— Keats

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It may stress the excellence and elaborateness of food and service

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the widows and other women prepare a special dinner, which may be so elaborate as to become a banquet— Amer. Guide Series: Ariz.

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or especially in popular use it may imply no more than a formal dinner held elsewhere than in a private home

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not so long ago the word "ban-quet" evoked pictures of barons of beef, turtle soup, boar's heads and ten courses served on solid gold plate . . . "banquet" today has become the generic word for any meal served in a private room in a hotel— Britannia & Eve

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father's club gave a banquet at the hotel— L. E. Billington

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Feast is often interchangeable with banquet but it may carry over a feeling of its other meaning of a festival of rejoicing and then stresses the shared enjoyment and pleasure in the occasion that gives rise to the meal

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a white cat purring its way gracefully among the wine cups at a feast given in honor of Apuleius— Repplier

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to share our marriage feast and nuptial mirth?— Keats

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it is not the quantity of the meat, but the cheerfulness of the guests, which makes the feast— Clarendon

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Unlike the other terms of this group feast has frequent extended use with the notion of a source of, often shared, enjoyment

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treasures his memories of that . . . visit, with vegetarian meals and a feast of conversation— Fogg

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human beings have always loved these perceptual feasts of sensuous satisfaction— Hunter Mead

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