A place where tea is made and served — the word English uses for the Chinese 茶館 and the Japanese tea room, especially when the tea is made with care and the setting matters as much as the drink. In Japanese use it often points to the small building in a garden used for the tea ceremony. Dictionaries usually describe it as Chinese or Japanese because that is where the word arrived from, but be careful: English also uses teahouse for places elsewhere — old-style tea rooms in Britain, teahouses in Iran and Turkey and Central Asia where men sit and talk for hours. So the word has widened. Also written tea house or tea-house. It is a rather bookish, travel-writing sort of word; English speakers describing where they had a cup of tea in their own country are more likely to say tea room, tea shop, or just café.