Tartary

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A vast and loosely defined historical region of Central and Northeast Asia, once inhabited by Turkic and Mongol peoples and known to early European mapmakers
2. The old European name for a huge, vaguely bounded territory stretching across inner and northern Asia, associated with Tatar peoples
3. A broad historical domain of Central and Northeast Asia that early Western geographers used to describe the lands of the Tatars and nearby nomadic groups

Etymology: The name for the vast region of Central and Northern Asia was once shaped by a word for the underworld. The Old Turkic form, rendered in runic script as "t¹t¹r¹", is the root that medieval Latin wrote as "Tartaria", meaning "land of the Tartars", the peoples of the steppe. Along the way, the spelling was bent toward "Tartarus", the Greek name for the pit of hell in mythology, so a place name for real peoples took on the sound of the underworld. The Greek "Tartaros" was a deep abyss, far below the earth, where the Titans were confined. Old French then turned the Latin "Tartarus" into "tartaire", describing something infernal, and the two streams of the word met in English. A reader of the period could hear a land of distant horsemen and a place of torment in the same name.