Definitions

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

  • noun A dark, oily, viscous material, consisting mainly of hydrocarbons, produced by the destructive distillation of organic substances such as wood, coal, or peat.
  • noun A solid residue of tobacco smoke containing byproducts of combustion.
  • transitive verb To coat with or as if with tar.
  • idiom (tar and feather) To punish (a person) by covering with tar and feathers.
  • idiom (tar and feather) To criticize severely and devastatingly; excoriate.
  • idiom (tarred with the same brush) Considered or described as having the same faults or bad qualities.
  • noun A sailor.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • To smear with tar; figuratively, to cover as with tar.
  • noun A small silver coin formerly current on the Malabar coast, especially at Tellicherri and Calicut. Sixteen tars of Calicut equal one fanam; one tar of Tellicherri is equivalent to four reas, and one hundred tars equal one rupee.
  • noun A thick dark-colored viscid product obtained by the destructive distillation of organic substances and bituminous minerals, as wood, coal, peat, shale, etc.
  • noun A sailor: so called from his tarred clothes, hands, etc. Also Jack Tar.
  • To incite; provoke; hound.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • transitive verb To smear with tar, or as with tar
  • transitive verb See under Feather, v. t.
  • noun colloq. A sailor; a seaman.
  • noun A thick, black, viscous liquid obtained by the distillation of wood, coal, etc., and having a varied composition according to the temperature and material employed in obtaining it.
  • noun See in the Vocabulary.
  • noun (Min.) a kind of soft native bitumen.
  • noun a strong quality of millboard made from junk and old tarred rope.
  • noun The ammoniacal water of gas works.
  • noun tar obtained from wood. It is usually obtained by the distillation of the wood of the pine, spruce, or fir, and is used in varnishes, cements, and to render ropes, oakum, etc., impervious to water.

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

  • noun uncountable A black, oily, sticky, viscous substance, consisting mainly of hydrocarbons derived from organic materials such as wood, peat, or coal.
  • noun Coal tar.
  • noun uncountable A solid residual byproduct of tobacco smoke.
  • noun slang, dated A sailor, because of their tarpaulin clothes. Also Jack Tar.
  • noun black tar, a form of heroin
  • verb transitive To coat with tar.
  • noun computing A program for archiving files, common on Unix.
  • noun computing A file produced by such a program.
  • verb computing To create a tar archive.

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

  • noun a man who serves as a sailor
  • verb coat with tar
  • noun any of various dark heavy viscid substances obtained as a residue

Etymologies

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

[Middle English, from Old English teru; see deru- in Indo-European roots.]

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

[Possibly short for tarpaulin.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Middle English terr, tarr, from Old English teoru, teru, from Proto-Germanic *terwan (compare West Frisian tarre, Dutch teer), from Proto-Indo-European *deru̯o (compare Welsh derw ‘oaks’, Lithuanian dervà ‘pinewood, resin’, Russian дерево (dérevo) ‘tree’), from *dóru ‘tree’. More at tree.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Abbreviation of tape archive.

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Examples

Comments

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  • Rat in reverse.

    November 3, 2007

  • TAR - (noun) - A rubber wheel.

    Usage: "Gee, I hope that brother of mine from Jawjuh don't git a flat tar in my pickup truck."

    April 8, 2008