Word.ws English Dictionary

tanya

/ˈtɑːnjə/US/ˈtɑnjə/

tanya is the alternative form of tania.

Meaning of tania

Noun

tania

  1. (rare) New cocoyam, yautia (Xanthosoma sagittifolium).
    • Most research on Colocasia esculenta has been done on taro (C. esculenta var. esculenta), which is grown in Hawaii, the Pacific islands and the Philippines, where it is an important staple food. Assumptions about the development of eddoe have to be based on extrapolations from taro, which belongs...1994, H Waaijenberg and E. Aguilar, Production and Partitioning of Dry Matter in Eddoe (Colocasia esculenta var. antiquorum) (Bib. Orton IICA / CATIE), page 3
  2. (rare) Taro.

See all 3 meanings of tania

Proper noun (1) capitalized: Tanya

Tanya

  1. A diminutive of the female given names Tatiana (from Russian) and Tetyana (from Ukrainian).
    • “Did Tanya... why, by the way, was she named Tanya? It's not a Southern name, is it?” “No,” said Fanny, “it's as Russian as Vladimir. But only a few people ever pronounced it correctly. I always did. Most people said ‘Tan-ya’, like the color tan. She and her mother hated it when that happened, and...1989, Alice Walker, The Temple of My Familiar, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, →ISBN, page 298
    • CNN and more than a dozen media outlets and groups asked US District Judge Tanya Chutkan for permission to “record and telecast” the March 2024 trial or for the court to “contemporaneously publish on YouTube its internally administered audiovisual livestreams and recordings of the proceedings.”2023 October 5, Devan Cole, “Media outlets ask judge for permission to broadcast Trump’s federal election subversion trial next year”, in CNN, archived from the original on 11 Nov 2023

Proper noun (2) capitalized: Tanya

Tanya

  1. the main work of Chabad Hassidic philosophy, formally called Likkutei Amarim, written by Shneur Zalman of Liadi, first published in 1797

Forms of tanya

alternative formTania
alternative formTaniya
alternative formTanja

Origin of tanya

Borrowed in the twentieth century from the Russian pet form Та́ня (Tánja) of Татья́на (Tatʹjána, “Tatiana”).

From Hebrew תַּנְיָא (tanyā), the first word in the book, from Aramaic תַּנְיָא (tanyā, “it was taught [in a Baraita]”).

Words formed from tanya

Questions about tanya

What does tanya mean?
Tanya means a diminutive of the female given names Tatiana (from Russian) and Tetyana (from Ukrainian).
What is tanya the alternative form of?
Tanya is the alternative form of tania.
What part of speech is tanya?
Tanya is a proper noun.
How do you pronounce tanya?
Tanya is pronounced /ˈtɑːnjə/ (UK).

Words near tanya in the dictionary

  1. tanwood
  2. tanwoods
  3. tanworks
  4. Tanworth-in-Arden
  5. tany-
  6. tanya
  7. tanyan
  8. tanyans
  9. tanyard
  10. tanyards
  11. Tanybryn

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: tanya (page history and authors); Tanya (page history and authors); tania (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.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-Tanya.wav.

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