Word.ws English Dictionary

tanists

tanists is the plural of tanist.

Meaning of tanist

Noun

tanist (plural tanists)

  1. (historical) The heir presumptive to the chieftainship or kingship of a Celtic clan in ancient Ireland, Scotland or Mann.
    • Lover, for her love he prowled with colonel Richard Burke, tanist of his sept, under the walls of Clerkenwell and, crouching, saw a flame of vengeance hurl them upward in the fog.1922 February 2, James Joyce, “[Episode 3: Proteus]”, in Ulysses, Paris: Shakespeare and Company […], →OCLC, part I [Telemachia], page 43

Questions about tanists

What is tanists the plural of?
Tanists is the plural of tanist.

Words near tanists in the dictionary

  1. Tanishpa's dwarf geckos
  2. tanist
  3. tanistic
  4. tanistries
  5. tanistry
  6. tanists
  7. tanistship
  8. tanistships
  9. Tanit
  10. tanite
  11. Tanites

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: tanists (page history and authors); tanist (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: “tanists.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/tanists. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.