As November is upon us and with it come cooler temperatures for many of us, it seems like a great time to explore another reader request and look into the history of the tea bag.

People have been brewing tea for thousands of years, of course, but it wasn’t until the early 1900s that the invention of the tea bag made single-serving brewing so easy. So who gets credit for that invention? There’s actually a bit of debate.

In 1901, Roberta C. Lawson and Mary Molaren of Milwaukee filed a patent for what we know as a tea bag, though they called it a “tea leaf holder.” Their design used fabric with a loose mesh and called for the bag to be big enough for water to flow around the leaves but small enough to hold the leaves together. They focused on how much less waste of tea leaves their holder would necessitate.

But the first practical application came in 1908, when tea manufacturer Thomas Sullivan sent out some samples in silk pouches. He merely intended the pouch to be an easy way to send these small samples…but his customers plopped them right into their tea cups and poured water over them! They proved popular enough that Sullivan began receiving requests for the tea-filled bags, and he soon learned that silk didn’t allow water through well enough and changed to a gauze with a bigger mesh. Customers loved the ease of the tea bag in brewing a single cup and also the cleanup.

By the 1920s, the world’s biggest tea companies had jumped onto the tea bag bandwagon and were selling their teas in individual servings. The bags haven’t changed significantly since then, though they did move gradually from a pouch style to the bag we see most often today.

Are you a tea enthusiast? Do you prefer tea bags or loose leaf? I drink a lot of tea that I buy loose-leaf…but I also buy tea bags that you can fill up with this tea yourself, called T-sacs*. Very handy, and you can get two brews from each of these bags of loose leaf tea!

*This is an affiliate link. If you purchase this product from this link, I will receive a small commission.

Word Nerds Merch!

Today’s Word of the Week comes from a reader request! Ready? Let’s take a look at the word elegant.

Elegant had been in the English language since the late 1400s, starting life with the meaning of “tastefully ornate.” Our English word came from the French élégant, which in turn comes from the Latin elegantem, an adjective meaning “choice, fine, tasteful.” The root of elegantem is actually eligere, a verb that means “to select with care, to choose.” This is the same root from which we get the word election! Did you realize those two were related? I didn’t!

Interestingly, the Latin adjective first carried the sense of “dantiy, fastidious” and was used as an insult or term of reproach. But eventually the Latin evolved to mean “tastefully refined,” which is what then carried over into French and English.

Word Nerds Merch!

Can you believe I’ve never featured pumpkin as a Word of the Week before? Gasp! And here it’s one of my favorite things about autumn in America!

The fruit native to North America has obviously been here well before English colonists named it, but our word for it dates from around 1640. It’s an alteration of the French word for melon, pompone or pumpion. The French, in turn, comes from the Latin peponem, which was used for melons and comes itself from the Greek pepon. What are the roots of the Greek word? “Ripe.” The notion was that the sun ripened or cooked the melons to give them their color. The -kin ending is a diminutive that comes from Dutch and often added to the ends of words to make them cutesy. (That’s the Roseanna interpretation of a diminutive, LOL.)

So what about one of my favorite treats, pumpkin pie? That combination of words dates from 1650! By 1781, pumpkin head was used of those with a person with hair cut short all around their head, and pumpkin was applied to “a stupid, self-important person” from the 1800s onward.

Are you a pumpkin fan? As a decoration? A food? A flavor? Do you like to carve them? (My answer to all of these is a resounding YES!)

Word Nerds Merch!