Etymology of tea

The Etymology of Tea has Chinese origins, and can be traced back to the Tang Dynasty. The Chinese character for tea is 茶, originally written as 荼 (pronounced tu, used as a word for a bitter herb), and acquired its current form in the eighth-century treatise on tea The Classic of Tea. The word is pronounced differently in the various Chinese languages, such as chá in Mandarin, zo and dzo in Wu Chinese, and ta and te in Min Chinese. One suggestion is that the different pronunciations may have arisen from the different words for tea in ancient China, for example tu (荼) may have given rise to tê. Other words for tea included jia (檟, defined as "bitter tu" during the Han Dynasty), she (蔎), ming (茗) and chuan (荈). Most, such as Mandarin and Cantonese, pronounce it along the lines of cha, but Hokkien varieties along the Southern coast of China and in Southeast Asia pronounce it like teh. These two pronunciations have made their separate ways into other languages around the world:

• Te is from the Amoy tê of southern Fujian province. It reached the West from the port of Xiamen (Amoy), once a major point of contact with Western European traders such as the Dutch, who spread it to Western Europe.
• Cha is from the Cantonese chàh of Guangzhou (Canton) and the ports of Hong Kong and Macau, also major points of contact, especially with the Portuguese, who spread it to India in the 16th century. The Korean and Japanese pronunciations of cha however came not from Cantonese, rather they were borrowed into Korean and Japanese during earlier periods of Chinese history.

The widespread form chai comes from Persian چای chay. This derives from Mandarin chá, which passed overland to Central Asia and Persia, where it picked up the Persian grammatical suffix -yi before passing on to Russian, Arabic, Urdu, Turkish, etc.

English has all three forms: cha or char (both pronounced /ˈtʃɑː/), attested from the 16th century; tea, from the 17th; and chai, from the 20th.

Languages in more intense contact with Chinese, Sinospheric languages like Vietnamese, Zhuang, Tibetan, Korean, and Japanese, may have borrowed their words for tea at an earlier time and from a different variety of Chinese, so-called Sino-Xenic pronunciations. Although normally pronounced as cha, Korean and Japanese also retain early pronunciations of ta and da. Japanese has different pronunciations for the word tea depending on when the pronunciations was first borrowed into the language: Ta comes from the Tang Dynasty court at Chang'an: that is, from Middle Chinese; da however comes from the earlier Southern Dynasties court at Nanjing, a place where the consonant was still voiced, as it is today in neighbouring Shanghainese zo. Vietnamese and Zhuang have southern cha-type pronunciations.

Etymological observations

The different words for tea fall into two main groups: "te-derived" (Min) and "cha-derived" (Cantonese and Mandarin). The words that various languages use for "tea" reveal where those nations first acquired their tea and tea culture.

• Portuguese traders were the first Europeans to import the herb in large amounts. The Portuguese borrowed their word for tea (chá) from Cantonese in the 1550s via their trading posts in the south of China, especially Macau.
• In Central Asia, Mandarin cha developed into Persian chay, and this form spread with Persian trade and cultural influence.
• Russia (chai) encountered tea in Central Asia.
• The Burmese word for "tea", lahpet (MLCTS: lak hpak, pronounced: [ləpʰɛʔ]) does not fall into either of the two main groups and may have originated independently.
• The Dutch word for "tea" (thee) comes from the Min dialect. The Dutch may have borrowed their word for tea through trade directly from Fujian, or from Fujianese or Malay traders in Java. From 1610 on, the Dutch played a dominant role in the early European tea trade, via the Dutch East India Company, influencing other languages to use the Dutch word for tea. Other European languages whose words for tea derive from the Min dialect (via Dutch) include English, French (thé), Spanish (té), and German (Tee).
• The Dutch first introduced tea to England in 1644. By the 19th century, most British tea was purchased directly from merchants in Canton, whose population uses cha, though English never replaced its Dutch-derived Min word for tea.

At times, a te form will follow a cha form, or vice versa, giving rise to both in one language, at times one an imported variant of the other.

• In North America, the word chai is used to refer almost exclusively to the Indian masala chai (spiced tea) beverage, in contrast to tea itself.
• The inverse pattern is seen in Moroccan colloquial Arabic (Darija), shay means "generic, or black Middle Eastern tea" whereas tay refers particularly to Zhejiang or Fujian green tea with fresh mint leaves. The Moroccans are said to have acquired this taste for green tea—unique in the Arab world—after the ruler Mulay Hassan exchanged some European hostages captured by the Barbary pirates for a whole ship of Chinese tea. See Moroccan tea culture.
• The colloquial Greek word for tea is tsáï, from Slavic chai. Its formal equivalent, used in earlier centuries, is téïon, from tê.
• The Polish word for a tea-kettle is czajnik, which could be derived directly from chai or from the cognate Russian word. However, tea in Polish is herbata, which, as well as Lithuanian arbata, was derived from the Latin herba thea, meaning "tea herb."
• The normal word for tea in Finnish is tee, which is a Swedish loan. However, it is often colloquially referred to, especially in Eastern Finland and in Helsinki, as tsai, tsaiju, saiju or saikka, which is cognate to the Russian word chai. The latter word refers always to black tea, while green tea is always tee.
• In Ireland, or at least in Dublin, the term cha is sometimes used for "tea," as is pre-vowel-shift pronunciation "tay" (from which the Irish Gaelic word tae is derived). Char was a common slang term for tea throughout British Empire and Commonwealth military forces in the 19th and 20th centuries, crossing over into civilian usage.
• The British slang word "char" for "tea" arose from its Cantonese Chinese pronunciation "cha" with its spelling affected by the fact that ar is a more common way of representing the phoneme /ɑː/ in British English.

Derivatives of te

Notes:

• ⁽¹⁾ from Latin herba thea (common for Belarusian and Polish)
• ⁽²⁾ té or thé, but this term is considered archaic and is a literary expression; since roughly the beginning of the 20th century, čaj is used for "tea" in Czech language, see the following table
• ⁽³⁾ neer means water; theyilai means "tea leaf" (ilai = leaf)
• ⁽⁴⁾ neeru means water; theyaaku means "tea leaf" (aaku = leaf in Telugu)

Derivatives of tea

Language	Name	Language	Name	Language	Name	Language	Name	Language	Name
Afrikaans	tee	Armenian	թեյ tey	Basque	tea	Belarusian	harbata (гарбата) (1)	Catalan	te
Czech	té or thé (2)	Danish	te	Dutch	thee	English	tea	Esperanto	teo
Estonian	tee	Faroese	te	Finnish	tee	French	thé	West Frisian	tee
Galician	té	German	Tee	Greek	τέϊον téïon	Hebrew	תה, te	Hungarian	tea
Icelandic	te	Indonesian	teh	Irish	tae	Italian	tè, thè or the	Javanese	tèh
Kannada	ಟೀಸೊಪ್ಪು Tee-soppu	Khmer	តែ tae	scientific Latin	thea	Latvian	tēja	Leonese	té
Limburgish	tiè	Lithuanian	arbata(2)	Low Saxon	Tee [tʰɛˑɪ] or Tei [tʰaˑɪ]	Malay	teh	Malayalam	തേയില Thēyila
Maltese	tè	Norwegian	te	Occitan	tè	Polish	herbata(1)	Scots	tea [tiː] ~ [teː]
Scottish Gaelic	tì, teatha	Sinhalese	té තේ	Spanish	té	Sundanese	entèh	Swedish	te
Tamil	தேநீர் theneer (3)	Telugu	తేనీరు theneeru (4)	Welsh	te

Language	Name	Language	Name
Japanese	だ da, た ta (1)	Korean	다 da [ta] (1)

• ⁽¹⁾ cha is an alternative pronunciation of "tea" in Japanese and Korean; see below

Derivatives of cha

Notes:

• ⁽¹⁾ The main pronunciations of 茶 in Korea and Japan are 차 cha and ちゃ cha, respectively. (Japanese ocha (おちゃ) is honorific.) These are connected with the pronunciations at the capitals of the Song and Ming dynasties.
• ⁽²⁾ Trà and chè are variant pronunciations of 茶; the latter is used mainly in northern Vietnam and describes a tea made with freshly picked leaves.

Derivatives of chay

Language	Name	Language	Name	Language	Name	Language	Name	Language	Name
Chinese	茶 Chá	Assamese	চাহ sah	Bengali	চা cha	Kapampangan	cha	Cebuano	tsa
English	cha or char	Gujarati	ચા chā	Japanese	茶, ちゃ Cha, (1)	Kannada	ಚಹಾ chahā	Khasi	sha
Konkani	च्या chyā or chao	Korean	차 cha (1)	Kurdish	ça	Lao	ຊາ saa	Marathi	चहा chahā
Oriya	ଚା cha	Persian	چای chā	Punjabi	چا ਚਾਹ chāh	Portuguese	chá	Sindhi	chahen چانهه
Somali	shaah	Sylheti	sa	Tagalog	tsaá	Thai	ชา cha	Tibetan	ཇ་ ja
Vietnamese	trà and chè (2)

Language	Name	Language	Name	Language	Name	Language	Name	Language	Name
Albanian (Tosk)	çaj	Amharic	ሻይ shai	Arabic	شاي shāy	Aramaic	ܟ݈ܐܝ chai	Armenian (Eastern)	թեյ tey
Azerbaijani	çay	Bosnian	čaj	Bulgarian	чай chai	Chechen	чай chay	Croatian	čaj
Czech	čaj (2)	English	chai	Finnish dialectal	tsai, tsaiju, saiju or saikka	Georgian	ჩაი chai	Greek	τσάι tsái
Hindi	चाय chāy	Kazakh	шай shai	Kyrgyz	чай chai	Kinyarwanda	icyayi	Ladino	צ'יי chai
Macedonian	чај čaj	Malayalam	ചായ chaaya	Mongolian	цай tsai	Nepali	chiyā चिया	Pashto	چای chay
Persian	چای chāī (1)	Romanian	ceai	Russian	чай chay	Serbian	чај čaj	Slovak	čaj
Slovene	čaj	Swahili	chai	Tajik	чой choy	Tatar	çäy	Tlingit	cháayu
Turkish	çay	Turkmen	çaý	Ukrainian	чай chai	Urdu	چائے chai	Uzbek	choy

Notes:

• ⁽¹⁾ Derived from the earlier pronunciation چا cha.