NODE / 0228attestedPresent-Day English

tea

PRONUNCIATION /tiː/

the leaves of Camellia sinensis or a beverage made by infusing them

DATE: 1655–today
SENSE: tea beverage
FAMILY: Indo-European / Germanic
CANONICAL KEY: node:1:tea:attested:sense:tea-beverage

This dossier follows the beverage sense. Later meal, social-event, herbal-infusion, and slang senses belong to separate semantic branches.

ANCESTRAL EDGES

ROOT OF THIS ROOT

GO DEEPERborrowingprobable

Dutch · 17th century–today · tea beverage

thee

tea

SOUND: English tea reflects the Dutch thee-type form; the modern /iː/ follows the wider English raising of earlier /eː/.
MEANING: The plant and beverage senses were retained, then English developed additional meal, social-event, infusion, and slang branches.
CHRONOLOGY: English is recorded from 1655; Dutch maritime diffusion belongs to the seventeenth century.
SCHOLAR: Östen Dahl
CONFIDENCE: probable — WALS describes Dutch-mediated European diffusion, while Merriam-Webster compresses the etymology to borrowing from Xiamen Chinese. The Dutch stage is therefore shown but disputed.

Chapter 138: TeasupportsChapter 138, discussion of Dutch diffusion from Amoy/Xiamen

Describes Dutch adoption of the Southern Min form and its spread through European and colonial maritime routes.

ORIGINAL ↗

Tea — Definition and Word HistorycontextEtymology and First Known Use

Compresses the English etymology to Chinese (Xiamen) dé and supplies the 1655 first-use date.

ORIGINAL ↗

OPEN CANONICAL EDGE 224 ↗

DIRECT DESCENDANT EDGES

THE NEXT HISTORICAL STEP

No reviewed descendants currently reuse this node. Absence describes the graph, not the entire history of the form.

TRANSITIVE DESCENDANT CLOSURE

EVERY REVIEWED BRANCH FROM HERE

This is the complete downstream closure currently supported by the canonical graph. Every displayed step is a real reviewed edge with its own sound claim, meaning claim, scholar, confidence, and citations.

UNIQUE DESCENDANT NODES: 0
REVIEWED EDGES: 0
DEEPEST PATH: 0
MODERN DOSSIERS REACHED: 0

No downstream edge has cleared review for this node. This is a graph-coverage statement, not a claim that the historical form produced nothing.

“Every” means every descendant in the reviewed SET-U graph. It does not convert missing scholarship or missing ingestion into a claim of historical completeness. The coverage ledger remains the honest denominator.

RECORDED EVIDENCE

ATTESTATIONS / FIRST KNOWN USE

SOURCE-REPORTEDlexicographic first useestablished

First known use reported as 1655

Merriam-Webster first-known-use record for tea

Source-reported lexicographic date. SET-U did not inspect the underlying 1655 primary object in this tranche.

tea dossier · recorded as tea

WITNESS RECORD ↗Tea — Definition and Word History ↗

EDITORIAL REUSE

WORD DOSSIERS USING THIS NODE

01teatea · established