- 1喝下午茶的時間（約下午四、五點）；在英國許多地方也直接指「晚餐時間」（傍晚五、六點）。台灣說的「下午茶」只對應前者。
In Britain, the time of day when people stop for tea and something to eat — and what that means depends on who is talking, which is where students get confused.
For many people, teatime is late afternoon, around four or five o'clock: a cup of tea with a or a piece of cake, a small break, not a proper meal. "See you at teatime." This is the sense closest to the famous "afternoon tea".
But for a great many British families, especially in the north of England and Scotland, tea IS the evening meal, so teatime means dinner time — the children come home, and at about half past five or six the family eats a hot meal and calls it tea. "What's for tea?" means "what's for dinner?" Neither use is wrong; they belong to different families and different regions, and they signal where you grew up and what class you come from.
The word is warm and domestic — it belongs to homes, children, and routines rather than restaurants. Americans rarely use it at all. Also spelled tea time or tea-time.
組成tea（茶）+ time（時間）→ 喝茶的時間。後來 tea 在英國家庭裡從「那杯茶」擴大成「配著茶吃的那一餐」，所以 teatime 才會多出「晚餐時間」這個意思。
原始詞典資料2 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，摘錄並精簡格式，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
teatimenoun
- 1
The traditional time, in the late afternoon, for serving tea (the meal).
- In the end, it was the Sunday afternoons he couldn't cope with, and that terrible listlessness which starts to set in at about 2:55, when you know that you've had all the baths you can usefully have that day, that however hard you stare at any given paragraph in the papers you will never actually read it, or use the revolutionary new pruning technique it describes, and that as you stare at the clock the hands will move relentlessly on to four o'clock, and you will enter the long dark teatime of the soul.
- 2
slangA social gathering or conversation centered on sharing gossip, rumors, or other personal news.
- It's me, hi I'm the problem, it's me At teatime, everybody agrees I'll stare directly at the sun, but never in the mirror It must be exhausting always rooting for the anti-hero
摘錄自 英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary，已精簡格式；依 CC BY-SA 4.0 授權使用，改動後的內容同樣以此授權提供。