Redbush
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 rooibos tea uncountable
"Sitting in her ocher-walled office with its tin roof and itinerant chickens, Mma Ramotswe sips redbush tea and ponders the ethics of her cases: the wife who wants the detective to steal back the car her husband has stolen; the grief-stricken mother who, with Mma Ramotswe's deft application of a little blackmail, might be reunited with a young grandson."
- 2 rooibos (shrub of genus Aspalathus) uncountable
"In the Cape region of South Africa the leaves of the wild redbush [Aspalathus linearis (Burm. f.) R. Dahlgr.] are collected by farmers for export as Rooibos tea."
Example
More examples"Sitting in her ocher-walled office with its tin roof and itinerant chickens, Mma Ramotswe sips redbush tea and ponders the ethics of her cases: the wife who wants the detective to steal back the car her husband has stolen; the grief-stricken mother who, with Mma Ramotswe's deft application of a little blackmail, might be reunited with a young grandson."
Etymology
Calque of Afrikaans rooibos, red + bush.
More for "redbush"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.