Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A member of a group of Turkic peoples primarily inhabiting Tatarstan in west-central Russia and parts of Siberia and Central Asia.
  • noun Any of the Turkic languages of the Tatars.
  • noun A member of any of the Turkic and Mongolian peoples of central Asia who invaded western Asia and eastern Europe in the Middle Ages.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A member of one of certain Tungusic tribes whose original home was in the region vaguely known as “Chinese Tatary” (Manchuria and Mongolia), and who are now represented by the Fishshin Tatars in northern Manchuria, and the Solons and Daurians in northeastern Mongolia, but more particularly by the Manchus, the present rulers of China.
  • noun In the middle ages, one of the host of Mongol, Turk, and Tatar warriors who swept over Asia under the leadership of Jenghiz Khan, and threatened Europe.
  • noun A member of one of numerous tribes or peoples of mixed Turkish, Mongol, and Tatar origin (descendants of the remnants of these hosts) now inhabiting the steppes of central Asia, Russia in Europe, Siberia (the latter with an additional intermixture of Finnish and Samoyedic blood), and the Caucasus, such as the Kazan Tatars (the remnant of the Kipchaks, or ‘Golden Horde’), the Krim Tatars in the Crimea, the Kalmucks or Eleuths (who are properly Mongols), etc.
  • noun A savage, intractable person; a person of a keen, irritable temper; as applied to a woman, a shrew; a vixen: as, she is a regular Tartar.
  • Of or pertaining to a Tatar or Tartar, or the Tatars or Tartars, or Tatary or Tartary.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun An agglutinative language belonging to the Uralian group of the Northwestern branch of Turkic languages. It is an official language of Tatarstan. There are some eight million speakers spread across Eastern Europe, Russia and Central Asia.
  • noun A person belonging to one of several Turkic, Tatar-speaking ethnic groups in Eastern Europe, Russia and Central Asia.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun a member of the Mongolian people of central Asia who invaded Russia in the 13th century
  • noun a member of the Turkic-speaking people living from the Volga to the Ural Mountains (the name has been attributed to many other groups)
  • noun the Turkic language spoken by the Tatar living from the Volga to the Ural Mountains

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Persian Tātār, of Turkic origin.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Old French Tartare.

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