First opened Tuesday, February 7, 2006
茶
ちゃ
- flat (heiban)
How to read it: a line over a kana means the voice is high there, and ↓ marks where it drops. A kana with no line is low. With no ↓ the pitch stays high to the end and does not drop even on a following particle (が, は).
tea
Cha, “tea”, is a doublet of チャイ (chai) and ティー (tī); compare Mandarin chá and Cantonese caa.
Taken apart
No breakdown is shown for this word: Wiktionary's text for it doesn't give a split that spells the word and joins to its reading, and any other split would be a guess.
Written with 茶
In a sentence
これは水っぽい茶だね。
This is a weak tea, isn't it?
茶はインドで広く栽培されている。
Tea is widely grown in India.
Sentences are from Tatoeba (CC BY 2.0 FR), picked by fixed rules from a dated export and shown unchanged. Nobody has reviewed them one by one.
What Wiktionary says
Quoted line by line from Wiktionary's Etymology section for this reading, taken from one dated dump so it can't change underneath us. Nothing below is paraphrased.
- “From various lects of Middle Chinese 茶 (MC drae). Compare Mandarin 茶 (chá), Hakka 茶 (chhà), Cantonese 茶 (caa⁴). Doublet of チャイ (chai), ティー (tī).”
Source: Wiktionary: 茶 (dump of 2026-09-02), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Reading, meaning and part of speech from JMdict, and kanji readings from KANJIDIC2 (EDRDG).
What the labels mean
- 漢語 Sino-Japanese
- Words built from Chinese-derived morphemes — borrowed from Chinese or coined in Japan out of Chinese parts — read with on'yomi.