Other forms: teas
Tea is the hot drink made from dried leaves. A cup of tea, make the tea, put the kettle on.
Black, green, white and oolong are all the same plant treated differently. In much of northern England and Scotland, tea is also the evening meal, which is one of the sharpest regional markers in British English. Afternoon tea is the meal with sandwiches and cake. Note tea break, teapot, teatime; and not my cup of tea, meaning not to my taste, which is about as British as a phrase gets.
1nounteaA hot drink made from dried leaves.
“Would you like a cup of tea with milk and sugar?”
2nounmealThe evening meal, in much of Britain.
“Tea is at about five and dinner is a different thing entirely.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
tea is a drink or meal.
The word came into English through Dutch traders from the Min Chinese te, while Russian, Turkish and Arabic took cha from Mandarin. The two names map the sea routes and the land routes almost exactly.
Dutch
thee
English, today
tea
Borrowed from Dutch thee. First appears c. 1655, in the English translation Álvaro Semedo’s writings. From Dutch thee, from nan-hbl 茶 (Amoy dialect), from och -, ultimately from sit-pro s-la (“leaf, tea”). Introduced to English and other Western European languages by the Dutch East India Company, who sourced their tea in Amoy; compare Malay teh along the same trade route. a doublet of chai and cha (and, distantly, the first element of lahpet), from same Proto-Sino-Tibetan root; see discussion of cognates. Cognates
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA