american-englishdialects
In several books and TV shows, there have been characters who say "et" instead of "ate" (As in, "I et dinner yesterday at 6:00"). I looked it up on Wiktionary, which defines it but doesn't say where it's used:
et
(colloquial or dialectal) simple past tense and past participle of eat
I live in the Midwest and I've never heard anyone say this in real life. Is there a specific dialect of American English that this is common to?
I grew up in West Lancashire (near the Yorkshire border), and pretty well every one of my parents generation used thee, thou, thy and thine. The first three were sometimes combined into a multipurpose “tha”.
Along with this perseverence of the informal second person singular, the equivalent verb form was still often used, e.g. “where goest thou?” instead of “where are you going” and “what dost tha want?” instead of “what do you want?”.
It can still be heard in the Lancashire/Yorkshire region particularly, in rural areas.
Usually, we omit the a in a situation like this:
I'm going to eat/have breakfast.
Unless you want to say something like this:
I usually eat a [adjective] breakfast.
Or:
We're having a breakfast meeting.
Etc.
But in the specific case you asked about, eat and have are interchangeable. They both convey the same message.
According to this Ngram, have is more common, but just barely.
Note: I'm not actually American, but seeing as how there isn't much variation between American and Canadian English, I would say I can still answer this question. I also used the American English corpus for my Ngram.
Best Answer
From Dictionary.com: