Word.ws English Dictionary

tai tai

tai tai noun: a wealthy woman who lives a life of leisure.

Noun

tai tai

  1. (Hong-Kong, Malaysia, Singapore) A wealthy woman who lives a life of leisure.

Forms of tai tai

alternative formtai-tai

Origin of tai tai

Borrowed from Mandarin 太太 (tàitai, literally “great-great”), originally a high-ranking honorific title for the wives of officials during the Ming dynasty, later generalising to "madam", "Mrs.", or "wife" in modern Mandarin. In Singapore, Malaysia, and Hong Kong English, the term underwent a semantic shift to specifically denote a wealthy married woman who enjoys a life of conspicuous leisure.

Questions about tai tai

What does tai tai mean?
Tai tai means a wealthy woman who lives a life of leisure.
What part of speech is tai tai?
Tai tai is a noun.

Words near tai tai in the dictionary

  1. Tai O
  2. Tai Ping
  3. Tai Ping Shan
  4. Tai Po
  5. Tai Shan
  6. tai tai
  7. Tai Tam
  8. Tai Tham
  9. Tai Yuan
  10. Tai'an
  11. Tai'erzhuang

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: tai tai (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “tai tai.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/tai_tai. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.