Don't Spill the Tea 🫖
Unless it's the first pour 😉
The etymology of the various words for tea reflects the history of transmission of tea drinking culture and trade
from China to countries around the world. Nearly all of the words for tea worldwide fall into three broad groups:
te, cha and chai, present in English
as tea, cha or char, and chai. The earliest of the three to enter English is cha, which came in the 1590s via the
Portuguese, who traded in Macao and picked up the Cantonese pronunciation of the word. The more common tea form
arrived
in the 17th century via the Dutch, who acquired it either indirectly from the Malay teh, or directly from the tê
pronunciation in Min Chinese. The third form cha.i (meaning "spiced tea") originated from a northern Chinese
pronunciation
of cha, which travelled overland to Central Asia and Persia where it picked up a Persian ending yi.
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