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ENGLISH · A WORD WITH POSSIBILITIES

tarn.

A small mountain lake, especially in Northern England.

4 characters1 syllables approx.English language

Meaning & usage

noun/tɑːn/Received-Pronunciation/tɑɹn/General-American
  1. A small mountain lake, especially in Northern England.

    Northern-England
  2. One of many small mountain lakes or ponds.

    US
Where this word comes from

From Middle English terne, tarne (“lake; pond, pool”), from Old Norse tjǫrn (“a small lake without tributaries”), from Proto-Germanic *ternō (“water hole”), perhaps related to *turnaz (“bitter, embittered”), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *der- (“to separate, split; to crack, shatter”). The word is cognate with Danish tjern, Faroese tjørn (“pond”), Icelandic tjörn (“pond”), Norwegian Bokmål tjern (“small forest or mountain lake”) (Norwegian Nynorsk tjern, tjørn), Swedish tjärn (“small forest lake”).

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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.

Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.