Tea

How to spell tea

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce tea

What does tea mean?

1. nounA hot drink made by infusing dried leaves of the tea plant in boiling water.
2. nounIn British and some Commonwealth usage, a light afternoon meal or the main evening meal.

Tea in a sentence

• She poured boiling water over the leaves and let the tea steep for four minutes.

• The children were called in from the garden for their tea at six o'clock.

• He prefers his tea with a splash of milk and no sugar.

• His mother always cooked a hot tea after work.

Where does tea come from?

Language of origin: Chinese

The word entered English in the 1600s from the Min Chinese word 'te' (pronounced 'tay'), used in the coastal Fujian region for the leaves of the Camellia sinensis plant and the drink made from them. Dutch traders, who shipped the leaf to Europe through the port of Amoy, carried the form 'thee', and English took it from there. Other European languages that received the product overland or by different routes use forms based on the Mandarin and Cantonese 'cha' instead, which is why we also have the slang 'char' for a cup of tea. The unusual 'ea' spelling preserves the older English pronunciation that once rhymed with 'say', a vowel that later shifted to the modern 'ee' sound. Because that sound now matches words like 'tee' and the musical 'ti', tea is a small but genuine homophone trap.

How the word is built

• tea (single root from Chinese 'te', the Min dialect word for the plant and its infusion)

Words that sound like tea

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• tee: A small peg, usually wooden or plastic, on which a golf ball is balanced before the first stroke of a hole.