Tat

How to spell tat

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce tat

What does tat mean?

1. nounCheap, shoddy or tasteless goods of little real value.

Tat in a sentence

• The seaside gift shop was full of plastic tat aimed at tourists.

• She cleared out a cupboard of broken ornaments and other useless tat.

Where does tat come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The noun 'tat' meaning cheap, shoddy or tasteless goods grew up alongside the adjective 'tatty', and both trace back to old words for a rag or ragged scrap of cloth. The likely ancestor is the Old English 'tættec', meaning a rag or tatter, a word of Germanic origin that also gave us 'tatter' and 'tattered'. Over time anything ragged, worn or worthless came to be described with this family of words, and by the twentieth century British English had clipped it down to the blunt little noun 'tat' for low-quality junk sold to tourists or piled on market stalls. A separate, older sense survives in lace-making, where 'to tat' means to produce 'tatting', a kind of knotted lace, again from the idea of looping rough threads. Because the word is so short and phonetically regular, the spelling itself causes almost no trouble; its interest lies in the surprising link between worthless market 'tat' and the delicate craft of 'tatting'.

How the word is built

• tat (single root; related to 'tatty' and 'tatter', a rag or scrap)