kati

The English word caddy, in the sense of a small container for tea, derives from the Malay word kati, a unit of weight used throughout the Malay Peninsula and the Indonesian archipelago. One kati was approximately 600 grams or about 1.3 pounds — the weight of tea that was typically packed in a single export container. When tea began arriving in Britain from China and Southeast Asia via the East India Company in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, it came in containers sized and labeled by Malay weight units; a single kati of tea in its container became a 'catty' or 'caddy,' and the word shifted from naming the weight to naming the container itself. This semantic shift — from unit of measurement to the container associated with that measurement — is a common lexical process in trade vocabulary, comparable to how 'barrel' moved from a measure of volume to a type of container.

Tea itself arrived in Britain from China, but the trade routes and the commercial vocabulary passed through the Malay world. The East India Company established its first Asian factory in Bantam, Java (now part of Indonesia) in 1603 and traded extensively through Malay ports before developing direct China trade routes. The Malay commercial vocabulary — including weights, measures, and trade terms — was absorbed into English commercial practice during this period. The kati was one of the standard units of Asian trade; it appears in Dutch, Portuguese, and English accounts of Southeast Asian commerce from the sixteenth century onward. As tea went from exotic luxury to daily necessity in Britain over the course of the eighteenth century, the vocabulary of its trade — including the container name derived from kati — domesticated into ordinary household English.

The tea caddy became a significant object of English domestic culture in the eighteenth century, precisely because tea was expensive. In the early and mid-1700s, the taxes on tea were so high that a single pound could cost a laborer several days' wages, and the tea caddy was typically fitted with a lock to prevent servants from pilfering the household's supply. Georgian and Regency-era cabinetmakers produced elaborate tea caddies in mahogany, fruitwood, and lacquered metal, often with compartments for different varieties of tea and elegant brass or silver fittings. The tea caddy thus became an object of aesthetic attention, and surviving examples are now collected as examples of decorative arts from the period. The locked tea caddy is itself a small social history: it records both the value of the commodity and the social anxieties of a household economy that depended on serving staff.

The same Malay kati also appears in English as 'catty' — a weight still used in some commercial contexts in Southeast Asia and China, where it has been standardized to 600 grams in metric countries. The catty as a unit of weight remains in use in Chinese, Malaysian, and Singapore food markets, particularly for fresh produce. The word caddy in British English refers specifically to the tea container; caddie or caddy in Scottish and then international golf terminology (the person who carries the golf clubs) is a separate word with a separate etymology, from the Scottish caddie or cadet, entirely unrelated to the Malay kati. The two meanings of caddy — the tea container and the golf bag carrier — are etymological strangers sharing the same phonetic form.