It’s called a “continental breakfast” because it’s modeled after the typical light morning meal eaten on the European continent, especially in countries like France and Italy, rather than the heavier cooked breakfasts traditional in Britain and the U.S. In 19th‑century Britain and later in American hotels, the phrase was used to signal a European‑style spread of bread, pastries, and coffee, as opposed to a full hot breakfast with eggs, meat, and other cooked items.

What “continental” actually refers to

  • “The continent” was a common British way of referring to mainland Europe, so a continental breakfast literally meant “the kind of breakfast they eat on the European continent.”
  • This contrasted with the hearty “full English” or big American farm breakfasts that were heavy, cooked, and calorie‑dense.

How the term caught on in hotels

  • By the late 1800s, hotels in the U.K. and U.S. started offering this lighter European‑style breakfast to cater to traveling Europeans, so they labeled it a “continental breakfast.”
  • It was cheaper and easier for hotels to provide bread, pastries, fruit, and coffee than to staff and cook full hot meals for every guest, so the term also became tied to cost‑effective, often “included” hotel breakfasts.

What’s usually in a continental breakfast

  • Typical items are pastries (like croissants), bread or toast with jam, butter, fruit, coffee, tea, and juice, emphasizing a simple and quick meal rather than a cooked feast.
  • Some modern hotels blur the line by adding a few hot items, but strictly speaking, once you have a full set of eggs, bacon, and other cooked dishes, it’s no longer a classic continental breakfast.

TL;DR: It’s called a “continental breakfast” because it imitates the light, bread‑and‑coffee style breakfasts common on the European continent, a term popularized by British and American hotels in the 19th century to distinguish it from big cooked breakfasts.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.