Other forms: teals
A teal is a small fast-flying wild duck. A teal on the water, a flight of teal, common teal.
It is the smallest European duck, and its speed and sudden vertical take-off make it the hardest of the common ducks to shoot. The plural is usually teal rather than teals. The colour teal — a dark blue-green — is named after the stripe on the common teal's head, which is a rare case of a bird naming a colour rather than the other way round.
1nountealA small fast-flying wild duck.
“A small flock of teal rose from the marsh and flew off low over the water.”
2noundarkA dark blue-green colour.
“She painted the kitchen cupboards a deep teal that looked great with brass handles.”
teal is a duck, or a colour.
Middle English tele probably comes from an unrecorded Old English word, with cognates in Dutch and Low German and none outside Germanic. The colour name dates only from about 1917.
Proto-Germanic
*tailijaz
Old English
*tǣle
Middle English
tele
English, today
teal
From Middle English tele, probably from an unrecorded Old English tǣle, cognate with West Frisian tjilling (“teal”), Middle Dutch teling (“teal”) (modern Dutch taling), Middle Low German telink, from Proto-Germanic tailijaz, of unknown ultimate origin, with no cognates outside of Germanic. Compare feal and heal for similar phonological development. As the name of a shade of dark greenish-blue like the color patterns on the fowl's head and wings, it is attested from 1923. The Australian political sense derives from the colour teal being intermediate between green (signifying environmentalism) and blue (signifying the conservative Australian Liberal Party).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in Birds, Colours & Patterns