A meal is everything you eat when you site down for breakfast, lunch or dinner. But, you can have different parts of that meal which are called courses. So, dinner is a meal and during dinner you might have an appetiser, a main dish and dessert. The appetiser, main and dessert are all courses. I had a three course meal for dinner yesterday. The courses were a salad as an appetiser, fish as a main dish and ice cream as a dessert. It was a delicious meal.

A meal can be made up of several courses for example the starter (or first course),the main course ( the meat/fish and vegetables) and the dessert of last course (the sweet,cake or fruit) All of these together are the meal.