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say it: tee
tea is a noun meaning "a beverage made by steeping tea leaves in water". It is pronounced /ˈti/ — tee. It carries 5 recorded senses.
a light midafternoon meal of tea and sandwiches or cakes
“an Englishman would interrupt a war to have his afternoon tea”
United Kingdom
a tropical evergreen shrub or small tree extensively cultivated in e.g. China and Japan and India; source of tea leaves
“tea has fragrant white flowers”
Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.
Definitions, synonyms and semantic relations for tea come from Princeton University’s WordNet. The pronunciation comes from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. Commonness is measured against a corpus of everyday English. Full sources and licences.