The Chinese character for tea

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.[11][12][13] 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.[14] 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;[15] 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.[16] There were other ancient words for tea, though ming (‘茗’) is the only other one still in common use.

[16][17] 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. 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.[18]