Tasseography (from the French tasse, "cup") is the art of divination by reading the patterns left by tea leaves, coffee grounds, or wine sediment in a cup. In the classic tea-leaf form, loose tea is brewed and drunk (or poured off) so that a residue of leaves remains; the drinker swirls the dregs, inverts the cup onto the saucer, and the reader then interprets the shapes the scattered leaves form against the sides and bottom of the cup, a bird, a ship, a ring, a letter, along with their position, since leaves near the rim are conventionally read as the near future or the present, and those toward the bottom as the more distant future or the deeper past.
The practice spread widely in Europe with the popularity of tea and coffee from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and a comparable coffee-ground reading (tasseomancy) is deeply embedded in Middle Eastern, Balkan, and Turkish/Greek social custom, where reading the cup after coffee is a familiar domestic ritual. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century popular manuals codified dictionaries of symbols and even produced special divining cups printed with zodiac signs and meanings. Understood as a technique, tasseography works much like other forms of reading random patterns, clouds, inkblots, the crystal ball, providing an ambiguous field onto which the reader projects intuitive imagery, framed by tradition and by the sitter's situation. It endures as one of the most homely and companionable of the divinatory arts, bound up with the everyday sociability of tea and coffee.