tearoom, noun

Forms:
Also T-room.
Origin:
EnglishShow more Special sense of general English tearoom a room in which tea is served.
1. café.
1951 A. Gordon-Brown Yr Bk & Guide to Sn Afr. 1951 607Alicedale,..Hotel, white population 148, is an important railway junction with Tea Room.
1951 Natal Mercury 5 Apr. 2A beautifully fitted up Tearoom and General Dealer on main road.
1959 G. & W. Gordon tr. of F.A. Venter’s Dark Pilgrim 134The police have often visited him here, but on the surface there is nothing wrong with a ‘tea room’.
1963 M.G. McCoy Informant, Port Elizabeth (now Gqeberha), Eastern CapeIt’s a nice place for a short visit, they’ve got ablution blocks now, and lots of taps and bins and braai places.., plus a tearoom for odd stores.
1972 Beeton & Dorner in Eng. Usage in Sn Afr. Vol.3 No.1, 32Tearoom in G[reat] B[ritain] is a room where tea is served, whereas in S. Afr. it can be the section set aside for serving light refreshments in a café or Greek shop wh[ich] also sells groceries, confectionery, etc.
1972 Evening Post 10 June 9The railway station was at the end of the main street with a restaurant-cum-tea room next door.
1976 Personality 22 Feb. (TV & Radio) 6I told the girl in our local tearoom I wanted 40 cigarettes of a brand I named.
1977 Daily Dispatch 19 Nov. 8When I was a girl of 17, the crowd in the office were doing their nuts about a fortune teller who was operating from a tearoom nearby. (Shows how long ago it was, who’s ever heard of a tearoom in this generation?)
1987 E. Prov. Herald 3 Jan. 1They started chanting ANC songs before ransacking a tea-room.
1990 R. Gool Cape Town Coolie 30He entered the tea-room, really an old-fashioned winkel.
2. combinations
tearoom bio, tearoom bioscope, tearoom cinema: bio-café.
1976 V. Rosenberg Sunflower 29Herman also whiled away many hours at the local T-room bioscopes.
1977 Sunday Times 2 Oct. (TV Times) 9Most of the Saturday evening films..would hardly have made it on the tea room bio circuit.
1978 T. Olsen in Cape Times 21 July 1An Epping schoolboy..went into a coma from a suspected drug overdose in a City tearoom cinema yesterday.
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tear, nounn.tea-water, nounn.
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