Grammar Girl Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing 'Tea' or 'chai'? Why we misspeak. Fellatone.
1012. Most words are different in different languages, but water from steeped leaves has only two main names: tea and chai. We look at why! Also, if you've ever mixed up words, like calling a butterfly a "flutterby," you'll love learning about what these slips of the tongue tell us about how we form sentences.
The "tea" segment was written by Valerie Fridland, a professor of linguistics at the University of Nevada in Reno and the author of "Like, Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English." You can find her at valeriefridland.com.
The "slips of the tongue" segment was written by Cecile McKee, , a professor of linguistics at the University of Arizona. It originally appeared on The Conversation and appears here through a Creative Commons license.
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References for the "tea" segment:
Ceresa, Marco. 2009. Tea: A very Short History. Daniel Leese, ed. Brill’s Encyclopedia of China. Leiden: Brill
Jurafsky, Dan. 2017. Tea. In Sybesma, R. P. E., Wolfgang Behr, Yueguo Gu, Zev J. Handel, Cheng-Teh James Huang, and James Myers, eds. 2017. Encyclopedia of Chinese Language and Linguistics. Leiden: Brill.
Tea Definition and Meaning. Merriam-Webster online.
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations FAO. 2021. A cup of tea…or chai? Available at https://www.fao.org/family-farming/detail/en/c/1639559/
Mair, Victor. 2019. Sinographs for “tea”. Language Log post. Available at https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=41281
Östen Dahl. 2013. Tea. In: Dryer, Matthew S. & Haspelmath, Martin (eds.) WALS Online.
Säily, Tanja, Mäkelä, Eetu and Samuli Kaislaniemi. 2019. Cha before tea: finding earlier mentions in a corpus of early English letters (part 1). Oxford English Dictionary Academic Case Studies. Available at