Tar is a very thick, black, and sticky material made when coal or wood is heated without air. It has a strong smell and is used to build roads and seal rooftops. When you walk on a fresh road, the black surface is often made with tar.
Workers poured hot tar on the new road.
The tar on the roof keeps out the rain.
When you tar something, you spread a thick black liquid called tar over it to protect it or make it stronger. Roads are often tarred to create a smooth, hard surface. Old wooden boats and fences were also tarred to stop water from getting in.
They tarred the road outside our house yesterday.
The workers tarred the wooden fence to protect it.
Tar in cigarettes is a dangerous sticky residue that forms when tobacco burns and is breathed into the lungs. It builds up over time and can cause serious lung diseases including cancer. Most cigarette packages show how much tar they contain as a health warning.
Cigarettes contain a lot of tar that damages your lungs.
Low-tar cigarettes are still very bad for health.
In older English, especially British English, a 'tar' or 'Jack Tar' was a nickname for a sailor. This word comes from the fact that sailors often used tar to waterproof ropes and the ship's deck, so tar was closely connected with their work. This meaning is now quite old-fashioned and rarely used in modern everyday speech.
The old tar had sailed the seas for forty years.
Many tars gathered at the port after the long voyage.
When you tar someone, you associate them with something bad or give them a negative reputation, often unfairly. The common phrase 'tar with the same brush' means treating a whole group as bad because of the actions of one person in that group. This is a figurative use that compares spreading bad reputation to spreading sticky black tar on something.
Don't tar all politicians with the same brush.
His bad actions tarred his whole family's good name.
Some trees, especially pine trees, produce a natural dark sticky substance also called tar. Pine tar has been used for hundreds of years to protect wood on ships and buildings. It was also used in old medicines to treat skin problems like psoriasis and dandruff.
Pine tar was used to treat skin problems in old times.
Farmers put tar on wooden barn walls to protect the wood.
In computer technology, TAR stands for 'Tape ARchive' and is a common file format used on Linux and Unix systems. A .tar file bundles many files and folders together into a single file without compressing them. Programmers often use tar files to share or store groups of files together, and they sometimes combine tar with compression to make .tar.gz files.
Download the source code as a tar file.
I zipped all the photos into one tar archive.
When wood or coal burns in a fireplace, a dark sticky material called tar or creosote slowly builds up on the inside walls of the chimney. This tar is very flammable and can cause dangerous chimney fires if it is not cleaned away regularly. Chimney sweeps are professionals who remove this tar to keep homes safe.
The chimney sweep cleaned the tar from inside the chimney.
Too much tar in a chimney can cause a dangerous fire.
