'''''Teh''''' is an [[Internet slang]] [[neologism]] most frequently used as an English [[article (grammar)|article]], based on a common [[typographical error]] of "''[[English articles#Definite article|"the"]]".''. ''Teh'' has subsequently developed [[grammar|grammatical]] usages distinct from ''the''.<ref name="Ross">{{Cite journal| last=Ross| first=Nigel| title=Writing in the Information Age| journal=English Today| volume=22| issue=3| pages=39–45|date=July 2006| doi=10.1017/S0266078406003063| s2cid=143850443}}</ref> It is not common in spoken or written English outside technical or [[leet]]speak circles, but when spoken, it is pronounced {{IPAc-en|t|ɛ}}, {{IPAc-en|t|ə}}, or "tay"{{IPAc-en|t|eɪ}}.<ref name="LeBlanc">{{Cite book|last=LeBlanc|first=Tracy Rene|title="Is there a translator in {{not a typo|teh}} house?": Cultural and discourse analysis of a virtual speech community on an internet message board|publisher=University of Louisiana at Lafayette|date=May 2005|url=http://etd.lsu.edu/docs/available/etd-04072005-145922/unrestricted/LeBlanc_thesis.pdf|access-date=2007-07-06|format=PDF|url-status=dead|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070703100446/http://etd.lsu.edu/docs/available/etd-04072005-145922/unrestricted/LeBlanc_thesis.pdf|archive-date=2007-07-03}}</ref>
==Usage==
''Teh'' originates from the common [[Typographical error|typo]] of ''the'', as might both occur and remain uncorrected when a person was typing rapidly prior to the widespread availability of [[autocorrect]] helper applications, and has become conventionalized in a variety of contexts.
In addition, it is a standard feature of leetspeak<ref name="Tavosanis">{{cite conference|first=Mirko|last= Tavosanis|title=A Causal Classification of Orthography Errors in Web Texts|book-title=IJCAI-07 Workshop on Analytics for Noisy Unstructured Text Data (AND-07)|pages=99–106|publisher=International Association for Pattern Recognition|date=2007-01-08| location=Hyderabad, India|url=http://research.ihost.com/and2007/cd/Proceedings_files/p99.pdf|access-date=2007-07-06|format=PDF}}</ref> and can be used ironically<ref name="Blashki">{{Cite journal|last=Blashki|first=Katherine|author2=Sophie Nichol |title=Game Geek's Goss: Linguistic creativity in young males within an online university forum (94/\/\3 933k'5 9055oneone)|journal=Australian Journal of Emerging Technologies and Society|volume=3|issue=2|pages=77–86|year=2005|url=http://ojs.lib.swin.edu.au/index.php/ajets-test/article/viewFile/52/83|access-date=2007-07-06}}</ref> or to mock someone's lack of "[[geek|techie]]" knowledge or skills, as an insult, or to reinforce a group's elitism;<ref name="LeBlanc"/> cf. [[eye dialect]].
