[ceptimus]

We call them "tea towels." You mean the things you use to dry dishes after washing up, right?

I don't know why 'tea', except I suppose it's a nice British thing: it differentiates them from hand towels, which we use to dry our hands, and bath towels or bathroom towels, which we don't use to dry our baths or bathrooms as the names suggest, but instead to dry our hands again, and other body parts too. Bath(room) towels are bigger than hand towels, but hand towels and tea towels are roughly the same area, usually. Tea towels are thinner, lighter, usually made of cotton, and often carry pictures, maps, charts, slogans or similar: even if they're not decorated like that then they're at least usually multicoloured - checks or stripes - a plain single-colour tea towel would be decidedly un-British.