Tee

How to spell tee

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce tee

What does tee mean?

1. nounA small peg, usually wooden or plastic, on which a golf ball is balanced before the first stroke of a hole.
2. verbTo place a golf ball on a peg, or to begin play by striking from that point.
3. nounA T-shaped pipe fitting that joins three sections so one line branches off at a right angle.

Tee in a sentence

• noun

  He balanced the golf ball on a wooden tee before his drive.

• verb

  The group will tee off at dawn to beat the afternoon crowds.

• noun

  The plumber fitted a copper tee to split the supply toward the bathroom.

• noun

  She pushed a plastic tee into the turf at the first hole.

• verb

  Players must tee up their balls behind the marker.

• noun

  Water leaked from the joint where the tee connected the two pipes.

Where does tee come from?

Language of origin: Other

The golfing sense of tee first appears in Scotland in the 1600s, where the spot a player struck from was originally called the 'teaz' or 'teeing ground'; over time the singular 'tee' was carved out as a back-formation from that older plural-sounding form. The little wooden peg we now picture is a much later development, dating only to the early twentieth century, when the marked patch of ground gave its name to the small support. A separate strand of meaning simply spells out the name of the letter T, and from the T-shape we get the plumbing 'tee', a fitting where one pipe branches at a right angle, as well as expressions like 'to a tee' meaning exactly right. The word is unrelated to the drink 'tea', which comes through Dutch from a Chinese dialect word, although the two are perfect homophones in English and are easily swapped in careless writing. The spelling trap is precisely that overlap: tee, tea, and the musical note ti all sound identical, so the context has to settle which one is meant.

How the word is built

• tee (whole word; originally a clipping of the older golf term 'teaz', of obscure origin)

Words that sound like tee

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

• tea: A hot drink made by infusing dried leaves of the tea plant in boiling water.