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Comment by philliphaydon | Hacker News Reader

I don’t understand where “boba” comes from. Because I live in Singapore, my wife is Taiwanese, so I travel to Taiwan a lot, no one calls it boba... I keep seeing American or European articles say boba. Even in this article it says boba known in Chinese... but I’ve never heard anyone in Asia call it boba... in English it’s always called “bubble milk tea” or “brown/black sugar bubble milk tea”, depending on what you want. Or if it’s added, it’s referred to as pearls.

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Every time this came up, I always insisted that it should be called booby tea. Because that's exact what Boba means, large breasts. That's a slang term meaning king of wave, because large breasts move in wave motion.

The pearl tea name came later, due to the vulgarness of it's predecessor I guess.

Now, you can enjoy more next time you suck on those sweet bouncy topioca.

One of the origin story of the term links to a once-popular Hong Kong actress Amy Yip[1], who was known for her cup size and sexy appearances in movies. The "nickname" 波霸, roughly translated to "Boobs overlord" in English, or transliterated to "Boba" (sounds similar in both Cantonese and Mandarin), was given to her by the media.

It was said that one bubble tea maker in Taiwan made large tapioca bubbles to put in milk tea, when tiny bubbles were used in milk tea at the time, and he named it "Boba tea", associating the relatively huge size of his bubbles with the actress well-known body feature.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amy_Yip

Had a Taiwanese friend who ran a bubble tea store and also always referred to the bubbles added as pearls. He only changed it when he realised that his predominantly non-Asian market didn't know what "adding pearls to your tea" meant.

I've also seen bubbles and pearls here in AU, but never boba. e.g. https://sharetea.com.au/bubble-tea-menu/

Perhaps it came out of the Chinatown SF area. I recall Asian Americans calling it ‘boba’ 20 years ago in the Bay Area.

I always assumed it was a corruption from someone saying "bubble" with an exaggerated Chinese accent.

Granted, I now know this is wrong, since it's apparently a straight-up mashing together of the words for "big" and "bubble". So, funny how languages work.

In my mind it has always been named simply 'milk tea'.

As opposed to 'Thai tea', which is a milk tea too, just the flavor and color are kinda specific. Besides, Thai tea in most places is really a 'Thai iced tea', I gave up on asking if it could be served hot (which it could, and tastes good too).

Meanwhile, the milk tea in most shops I've been can be served hot or iced on demand. Moreover, the kind of tea used can also be selected.

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