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tsar

nounattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//(t)sɑː//
  • United Kingdom//zɑː//
  • United States//(t)sɑɹ//
  • United States//zɑɹ//

A person with great power; an autocrat.

noun

  1. 1

    historicalAn emperor of Russia (1547 to 1917) and of some South Slavic states.

    [W]hy, in the name of common sense, should the English call the Czar (tsar) of Russia razc?

    I vuz never beink too krazy about any of dose tsari.

    >There IS a difference between the Russians as a group of people and Soviet communism! Ha ha ha! Know any other good ones? First their^([sic]) were the plain old tsari, then the red tsari (Stalin, etc) and know Putin is the 'new look' tsar. But the same beastly imperialist bullying goes on.

    At that time Mongol princes faced the challenge of choosing from three options: either combine all their forces and fight against the Manchus, which were stronger and had taken over all of China at that time, or approach the Russian Tsari as did the Buryat and Khalmig Mongol princedoms or to follow the way of Inner Mongolia and accept relative autonomy given by the Manchu.

  2. 2

    figurativeA person with great power; an autocrat.

    Chin Chien-shih, an old poor peasant of Korean nationality, said: "The wolfish ambition of the new tsars is exactly the same as that of the old tsars. The Soviet revisionist renegade clique is struggling desperately in the hope of saving itself from doom, but this will only bring on its destruction more quickly."

Etymology

Etymology tree Latin Caesarbor. Proto-Germanic *kaisarazder. Proto-Slavic *cěsařь Old East Slavic цѣсарь (cěsarĭ) Old East Slavic цьсарь (cĭsarĭ) Russian царь (carʹ)bor. English tsar Borrowed from Russian царь (carʹ), from Old East Slavic цьсарь (cĭsarĭ), from Proto-Slavic *cěsařь, from a Germanic language, from Proto-Germanic *kaisaraz, from Latin Caesar. Doublet of Caesar and Kaiser. The spelling tsar began to replace the older czar in the nineteenth century. Compare Byzantine Greek Τζαῖσαρ (Tzaîsar).

Forms

plural
tsars, tsari
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).