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Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
tea-leaf

1756, from tea + leaf (n.). Related: Tea-leaves.

Wiktionary
tea-leaf

n. (alternative spelling of tea leaf English)

Usage examples of "tea-leaf".

Nancy had gone to tea-leaf readers, psychics, palm and tarot card readers.

Mrs Ruddle is in such a state of excitement that she has probably boiled the milk and put the tea-leaves into the sandwiches.

Mrs Pettigrew, the widowed postmistress, who dyed her hair with tea-leaves and kept a small limp dog which looked like a skein of grey wool.

In her lexicon, the astrologist merely used the signs of the zodiac to focus a precognitive gift, one fortunately more scientifically based than tea-leaf reading or card-telling.

His previous job had qualified him as a man who could hear the grass grow and read tea-leaves with the best of them.

So I joked about it: my cracked crystal ball - a small time machine I keep in the basement next to my Ouija Board - my seance guiding spirit, Chief Forked Tongue - tea-leaves, but it has to be Black Dragon tea, Lipton's Orange Pekoe doesn't have the right vibrations.