Etymology of tea

[1] In this context, tea generally refers to the plant Camellia sinensis and/or the aromatic beverage prepared by pouring hot boiling water over the leaves.

[2] The third form chai (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, and entered English via Hindustani in the 20th century.

The written form of the Chinese word for tea was created in the mid-Tang dynasty by modifying the character 荼 pronounced tu, meaning a "bitter vegetable".

Cha for example may have been derived from an archaic Austro-Asiatic root word *la (Proto-Austroasiatic: *slaʔ, cognate with Proto-Vietic *s-laːʔ), meaning "leaf", while ming may be from the Mon–Khmer meng (fermented tea leaves).

These two pronunciations have made their separate ways into other languages around the world:[16] English has all three forms: cha or char (both pronounced /ˈtʃɑː/), attested from the late 16th century;[21] tea, from the 17th;[22] and chai, from the 20th.

Although normally pronounced as cha (commonly with an honorific prefix o- as ocha) or occasionally as sa (as in sadô or kissaten), Japanese also retains the early but now uncommon pronunciations of ta and da.

Ja is the Go-on (呉音) reading from Wuyue region,[citation needed] and comes from the earlier Wu language centered at Nanjing, a place where the consonant was still voiced, as it is today in Hunanese za or Shanghainese zo.