Meaning

noun a blue-green color or pigment

noun any of various small short-necked dabbling river ducks of Europe and America

adjective of a bluish shade of green

originFrom 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. As the name of a shade of dark greenish-blue like the color patterns on the fowl's head and wings, it is…

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 3.0