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teal

nounadjectiveattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//tiːl//
  • United Kingdom/[tiːɫ]/
  • United States//til//

Any of various small freshwater ducks of the genus Anas that are brightly coloured and have short necks.

noun

  1. 1

    Any of various small freshwater ducks of the genus Anas that are brightly coloured and have short necks.

  2. 2

    A dark, somewhat bluish-green colour; a dark cyan.

  3. 3

    A teal independent.

    In a bid to defend their inner-city seats, the Liberal Party has moved towards the environmental and progressive left in what can be described as a “teal strategy” that blurs the lines between the Liberals and the Greens.

    Concerns of a targeted dirty tricks campaign targeting “teal” independents has prompted the Australian Electoral Commission to bring in its electoral integrity assurance taskforce as pre-polling opens.

    Ms Haines is a strong proponent of this, and many of the teal cross benchers support her approach to appointing a whistleblower protection commissioner.

    That tiny blue slice is what’s left of the Coalition (both Liberals and Nationals), squeezed between the teals and a barbarian horde of mouthbreathers, grifters and flat-out, flat-earth fucking weirdos gathered under the bright-orange war banner of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation — or, as they would officially henceforth be known, His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition.

Etymology

From Middle English tele, probably from an unrecorded Old English *tǣle, cognate with West Frisian tjilling (“teal”), Middle Dutch teling (“teal”) (modern Dutch taling), Middle Low German telink, from Proto-Germanic *tailijaz, of unknown ultimate origin, with no cognates outside of Germanic. Compare feal and heal for similar phonological development. As the name of a shade of dark greenish-blue like the color patterns on the fowl's head and wings, it is attested from 1923. The Australian political sense derives from the colour teal being intermediate between green (signifying environmentalism) and blue (signifying the conservative Australian Liberal Party).

adjective

  1. 1

    Having a bluish-green colour.

Forms

plural
teals
comparative
more teal
superlative
most teal
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).