The leaves are evergreen, 7–110 millimetres (0.3–4.3 in) long and 30–55 millimetres (1.2–2.2 in) wide, with serrated margins. Ilex paraguariensis begins as a shrub and then matures to a tree, growing up to 15 metres (49 ft) tall. If the tonic syllable were the last one, the accent would be required, as maté. In both Spanish and Portuguese, the first syllable of mate (plant) is the tonic one, and the word does not require a written accent. There are no variations in spelling of mate (the plant) in Spanish. Indeed, the word maté in Spanish has a completely different meaning in Spanish: maté is understood as being the first person past tense conjugation of matar ('to kill') and means 'I killed'. The addition of the acute accent over the final 'e' in the English spelling was likely added as a hypercorrection to indicate that the final '-é' is not silent. In English, both the spellings mate and maté are used to refer to the plant or beverage, but the latter spelling is incorrect in both Spanish and Portuguese, as it would put the stress on the second syllable, while the word is correctly pronounced with the stress on the first syllable. Most people colloquially call both the plant and the beverage by the word mate. While chá mate is made with roasted leaves, the other drinks are made with raw or lightly toasted green leaves, and are very popular in the south and center-west of the country. The drinks it is used to prepare are chimarrão (hot traditionally served in a gourd), tereré (cold traditionally served in a bull horn), or chá mate (hot or cold lit. The Portuguese name for the plant is pronounced variously as, or, in the areas of traditional consumption. Yerba mate, therefore, originally translated literally as the 'gourd herb', i.e. In Argentina, yerba refers exclusively to the yerba mate plant. Yerba may be understood as 'herb' but also as 'grass' or 'weed'. The word hierba is Spanish for 'herb', where the initial 'h' is silent yerba is a variant spelling of hierba used throughout Latin America. The accent on the word mate is on the first syllable. The pronunciation of yerba mate in Spanish is. The word mate is used in modern Portuguese and Spanish. Mate is from the Quechua mati, a word that means 'container for a drink' and 'infusion of an herb', as well as 'gourd'. Congonha, in Portuguese, is derived from the Tupi expression, meaning something like 'what keeps us alive', but a term rarely used nowadays. The name given to the plant in the Guaraní, language of the indigenous people who first used mate, is ka'a, which has the same meaning as 'herb'. 6.7 Monoamine oxidase inhibition activity.6.1 Chemical composition and properties.Yerba mate can now be found worldwide in various energy drinks as well as being sold as a bottled or canned iced tea. It has also become popular in the Druze and Alawite community in the Levant, especially in Syria and Lebanon, where it is imported from Paraguay and Argentina, thanks to 19th-century Syrian immigrants from Argentina. Mate is traditionally consumed in central and southern regions of South America, primarily in Paraguay, as well as in Argentina, Uruguay, southern and central-western Brazil, the Gran Chaco of Bolivia, and southern Chile.

After the Jesuits discovered its commercialization potential, yerba mate became widespread throughout the province and even elsewhere in the Spanish Crown.

Its consumption was exclusive to the natives of only two regions of the territory that today is Paraguay, more specifically the departments of Amambay and Alto Paraná. The indigenous Guaraní and some Tupí communities (whose territory covered present-day Paraguay) first cultivated and consumed yerba mate prior to European colonization of the Americas. Both the plant and the beverage contain caffeine. The leaves of the plant can be steeped in hot water to make a beverage known as mate. It was named by the French botanist Augustin Saint-Hilaire. Yerba mate or yerba-maté ( Ilex paraguariensis from Spanish Portuguese: erva-mate, Portuguese pronunciation: or Guarani: ka'a, IPA: ) is a plant species of the holly genus Ilex native to South America.

Only drink yerba mate translate spanish