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Tar   /tɑr/   Listen
noun
Tar  n.  A sailor; a seaman. (Colloq.)



Tar  n.  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.
Coal tar. See in the Vocabulary.
Mineral tar (Min.), a kind of soft native bitumen.
Tar board, a strong quality of millboard made from junk and old tarred rope.
Tar water.
(a)
A cold infusion of tar in water, used as a medicine.
(b)
The ammoniacal water of gas works.
Wood tar, 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.



verb
Tar  v. t.  (past & past part. tarred; pres. part. tarring)  To smear with tar, or as with tar; as, to tar ropes; to tar cloth.
To tar and feather a person. See under Feather, v. t.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Tar" Quotes from Famous Books



... cottages and the wild hills, mingling with the townsfolk—this crowd, broken up into levels and patches by river and houses and lanes, moved to and fro in the October sunshine, and sent up, with the column of smoke that eddied out from beneath the bubbling tar-cauldron by the gallows, a continual murmur of talking, like the sound of slow-moving ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson

... Husband; and you know 'twas I that advised you to make the Purchase, and therefore I'll never give my Consent to have the Child brought up by such a stinking Tar-barrel as now sues for him; he'd only bring him up to be a Swabber; no, no, he was born a Merchant and a Gentleman, and he shall ...
— The City Bride (1696) - Or The Merry Cuckold • Joseph Harris

... were mustered. We plunged into the night of the building. Our feet stumbled and climbed helter-skelter, between pitched walls up the steps of a damp staircase, which smelt of stale tobacco and gas-tar, like all barracks. They led us into a dark corridor, pierced by little pale blue windows, where draughts came and went violently, a corridor spotted at each end by naked gas-jets, their flames buffeted ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse

... day had drawn to a close. A wild, stormy, rainy night then set in, but still the royalist party—citizens and soldiers intermingled—all armed to the teeth, and uttering fierce cries, while the whole scene was fitfully illuminated with the glare of flambeaux and blazing tar-barrels, kept watch in the open square around the city hall. A series of terrible Rembrandt-like nightpieces succeeded—grim, fantastic, and gory. Bertoul, an old man, who for years had so surely felt himself predestined ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... looked round. The restaurant was in an underground basement; it was damp and dark, and reeked with the stifling fumes of vodka, tobacco-smoke, tar, and some acrid odor. Facing Gavrilo at another table sat a drunken man in the dress of a sailor, with a red beard, all over coal-dust and tar. Hiccupping every minute, he was droning a song all made up of broken and incoherent words, strangely ...
— Creatures That Once Were Men • Maxim Gorky


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