tea leaves
"tea-leaves" is a 9-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“tea leaves” is uncommon English (outside the top frequency list), classed as a noun. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency English
- 10
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - plural of tea leaf
Corpus desk
Index EN-tea-leaves · tea leaves · English
tea leaves · unranked · 0 variants · 0 confusables
- FREQ-UNRANKED Unranked
- LEN-MEGA 10 letters
- VOW-5 5 vowels
- CONFUS-0 No pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-THIN "T" thin
- PHOTO-UNK Peer pending
Read with this headword: Spelling guide for this pattern
Desk codes from Wiktionary headword shape, FrequencyWords rank tier, confusable-pair count, generated misspelling depth, letter-cohort book size, and photo-finish peer. Not a difficulty grade.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | tea leaves |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| Letters | 10 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Long-tail rank of “tea leaves” in English
Rare enough to double-check
tea leaves is uncommon English outside the top frequency list, classed as anoun. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. 2 senses are on record.
tea leaves has no tracked misspelling variants, which points to an orthography that plays by predictable English rules. It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, since nothing in our dataset looks or sounds close enough to cause mix-ups.
Wiktionary doesn't record an etymology for this headword, so spelling patterns must be inferred from the word's phoneme-to-grapheme mapping rather than from a documented borrowing chain. The correct English form is tea leaves, spelled T-E-A- -L-E-A-V-E-S.
Definition
- 1plural of tea leaf
- 2Anything, not necessarily tangible, that is used to make a prediction.
Recorded use
Wiktionary exampleThese source excerpts show how tea leaves appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
Read the tea leaves.
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.