"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 27/09/17(char, cup of char)

I'm focused on Alice Reynolds, who e-mailed in and said, "I've often wondered where the "char" and "cup of char" came from"? which is appropriate for an almost tea-time show, as we are. It emerged as a slang for "tea", "char" in the 1920s, and it was actually a popular spelling of "cha" and that was form Mandarin dialect of Chinese, that was their word for "tea". So you might expect the "char" in the now old-fashioned term "charwoman" to have, sort of, slightly the same history - perhaps a charwoman used to serve tea. Actually that's very different, it has very different beginnings. It is linked to the word "chore", and that goes back to an Old English term meaning "a turning", with the idea of doing a turn of work which, of course, is what a charlady of a charwoman used to do. It's perhaps slightly derogatory to use it now, but certanly, it used to be very much in vogue. But London's Charing Cross shares that same ancestry, because its name is explained by the fact that the old hamlet of Charing was situated at a bend, or a turn in the River Thames. So "char" crops up there as well. And there's one other sense of char which I think requires possibly an even greater leap of faith, because in Scotland, when the door is neither open or shut complitely, it's almost "at a turn",  it's turned a little way. It was described as being "at char" - again, that idea of turning comes into it. And, of course, gradually, as things do, they become a little bit slippery in English, and "at char" became "ajar", which is we get "ajar" from today. So, three lots of "char", very different senses, but they all share the same ancestry.