Meaning & use

Tartary

proper noun·Advanced

A historical name used by Europeans for a vast, loosely defined region of Central and Northern Asia.

See it in a sentence

Old European maps labeled much of the land between Russia and China as Tartary.

Merchants once described goods arriving from Tartary without knowing exactly where the region began or ended.

A note on using this word

Tartary was never a single country; it was a vague geographic label used from medieval to early modern times, roughly matching parts of modern Central Asia, Mongolia, and Siberia.

Words with a similar meaning

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