Teaspoon

How to spell teaspoon

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce teaspoon

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does teaspoon mean?

1. nounA small spoon used for stirring drinks or as a standard cooking measure.

Teaspoon in a sentence

• He stirred sugar into his coffee with a teaspoon.

• The recipe calls for one teaspoon of baking powder.

Where does teaspoon come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a transparent English compound, simply joining 'tea' and 'spoon'. The word 'tea' came into English in the 1600s from the Chinese (Amoy dialect) 'te', the name for the leaf and its infusion, reaching Europe through Dutch traders. 'Spoon' is far older and thoroughly Germanic, descending from the Old English 'spon', which originally meant a chip or splinter of wood, since the earliest spoons were carved shavings. The compound 'teaspoon' appeared in the early 1700s once tea drinking became fashionable and small spoons were needed to stir the cup. It later became a standard cooking measure, roughly five millilitres, which is why recipes everywhere still abbreviate it as 'tsp'.

How the word is built

• tea (the drink)
• spoon (eating/measuring implement)