pretend tea party
- noun
- Baby Talk
:
fiesta de té imaginaria
- The children laughed and chatted while hosting a pretend tea party in the garden with their toy dishes.
Examples
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During playtime, the kids set up a pretend tea party under the big oak tree, pretending to sip tea and eat cookies.
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For her birthday, Mia invited her friends over for a pretend tea party complete with imaginary cakes and sandwiches.
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Finn would bet his last grade increase that, instead of playing with Barbie dolls and having pretend tea parties like other little girls, SAC Jansen had spent her childhood drowning kittens.
Fiction book (2002)
How Real
- Baby Talk
33
3.2
Surface Forms
Morphology
The phrase is fully compositional: 'pretend' (act as if) modifies 'tea party' (a social gathering for tea), so the meaning 'a make-believe tea gathering' is directly derivable from the constituents. This kind of children’s make‑believe construction is cross‑linguistically common and would be clear to a B1 learner who knows the component words.
Etymology
Pretend tea party comes from children acting out a tiny tea party with toy cups and dolls, where they pretend to pour and serve tea. So it means 'a child's play activity where kids copy a real tea gathering'.