tee

Tee is a term with several distinct meanings across sports, clothing, technology, and engineering.

In golf, a tee is a small peg, usually made of wood or plastic, used to elevate the ball for the initial stroke on a hole. The ball rests on the tee during the drive; tees come in different heights to accommodate players, course design, and club selection. While traditional wooden tees are common, modern alternatives include biodegradable materials and adjustable-height designs.

In clothing, tee is short for T-shirt, a casual, collarless shirt with short sleeves. Typically made from cotton or a cotton blend, tees are a staple of everyday wear and come in a wide range of styles, colors, and fits.

In computing and data processing, the Unix command tee reads standard input and writes the data to both standard output and one or more files. It is commonly used in pipelines to capture a copy of a stream without interrupting it; options allow appending to files and controlling buffering.

In plumbing and mechanical engineering, a tee is a three-way pipe fitting that forms a T-shaped junction to connect three pipe runs and create a branch line. It enables fluid or gas to be split or redirected in a system.

In the alphabet, tee is the spoken name of the letter “T” in English; the letter is a basic symbol used across mathematics, science, and notation. The term is also encountered in various specialized contexts, such as naming conventions and labeling.