page_title: Tea
section_title: Etymology
hierarchical_section_title: Tea / Etymology
caption_attribution_description: English: Tea garden of Assam, Assam Tea
context_page_description: Tea is an aromatic beverage commonly prepared by pouring hot or boiling water over cured or fresh leaves of the Camellia sinensis, an evergreen shrub native to East Asia. After water, it is the most widely consumed drink in the world. There are many different types of tea; some, like Darjeeling and Chinese greens, have a cooling, slightly bitter, and astringent flavour, while others have vastly different profiles that include sweet, nutty, floral, or grassy notes. Tea has a stimulating effect in humans primarily by its caffeine content.
  Tea originated in the region encompassing today's Northeast India, north Myanmar, Southwest China and Tibet, where it was used as a medicinal drink by various ethnic groups in the region. An early credible record of tea drinking dates to the 3rd century AD, in a medical text written by Hua Tuo. It was popularised as a recreational drink during the Chinese Tang dynasty, and tea drinking spread to other East Asian countries. Portuguese priests and merchants introduced it to Europe during the 16th century. During the 17th century, drinking tea became fashionable among the English, who started to plant tea on a large scale in India.
context_section_description: The Chinese character for tea is 茶, originally written with an extra stroke as 荼 (pronounced tú, used as a word for a bitter herb), and acquired its current form during the Tang dynasty. The word is pronounced differently in the different varieties of Chinese, such as chá in Mandarin, zo and dzo in Wu Chinese, za in some Xiang Chinese dialects, 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 tú (荼) may have given rise to tê; historical phonologists however argued that the cha, te and dzo all arose from the same root with a reconstructed pronunciation dra, which changed through sound shifts through the centuries. There were other ancient words for tea, though ming (茗) is the only other one still in common use. It has been proposed that the Chinese words for tea, tu, cha and ming, may have been borrowed from the Austroasiatic languages of people who inhabited southwest China; cha for example may have been derived from an archaic Austroasiatic root *la, meaning "leaf". Most Chinese languages, such as Mandarin and Cantonese, pronounce it along the lines of cha, but Hokkien and Teochew Chinese varieties along the southern coast of China pronounce it like teh. These two pronunciations have made their separate ways into other languages around the world. 
  Starting in the early 17th century, the Dutch played a dominant role in the early European tea trade via the Dutch East India Company. The Dutch borrowed the word for "tea" (thee) from Min Chinese, either through trade directly from Hokkien speakers in Formosa where they had established a port, or from Malay traders in Bantam, Java. The Dutch then introduced to other European languages this Min pronunciation for tea, including English tea, French thé, Spanish té, and German tee. This pronunciation is also the most common form worldwide. The cha pronunciation came from the Cantonese chàh, especially through Portuguese traders who settled Macau in the 16th century. The Portuguese adopted the Cantonese pronunciation "chá", and spread it to India. However, the Korean and Japanese pronunciations of cha were not from Cantonese but were borrowed earlier periods of Chinese history.
  A third form, the increasingly widespread chai, came from Persian چای [tʃɒːi] chay. Both the châ and chây forms are found in Persian dictionaries. They are derived from the Northern Chinese pronunciation of chá, which passed overland to Central Asia and Persia via the Silk Road, where it picked up the Persian grammatical suffix -yi before passing on to Russian as чай ([tɕæj], chay), Arabic as شاي (pronounced shay [ʃæiː] because of the lack of a /t͡ʃ/ sound in Arabic), Urdu as چائے chay, Hindi as चाय chāy, Turkish as çay, etc. English has all three forms: cha or char (both pronounced /tʃɑː/), attested from the 16th century; tea, from the 17th; and chai, from the 20th. However, the form chai today refers specifically to a black tea mixed with sugar or honey, spices and milk.
  The few exceptions of words for tea that do not fall into the three broad groups of te, cha and chai are languages from the botanical homeland of the tea plant, from which the Chinese words for tea might have been borrowed originally: northeast Myanmar and southwest Yunnan.  Examples are la (meaning tea purchased elsewhere) and miiem (wild tea gathered in the hills) from the Wa people, lahpet (လက်ဖက်) in the Burmese language, and meng in Lamet meaning "fermented tea leaves", as well as miang (เมี่ยง) in the Northern Thai language ("fermented tea").
caption: Tea plantation in Assam, India
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