Word.ws English Dictionary

tarball

tarball noun: a ball of tar or crude oil found on a beach.

Noun

tarball (plural tarballs)

  1. A ball of tar or crude oil found on a beach.
    • All of us who have been to the beaches this year have encountered tarballs that stick to our feet and mess up our rugs.1969, Hearings By United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on the Judiciary
  2. A file that is an archive of several other files, created using the Unix tar utility.

Verb

tarball (third-person singular simple present tarballs, present participle tarballing, simple past and past participle tarballed)

  1. (transitive) To archive into a tarball.

Forms of tarball

Noun
pluraltarballs
Verb
third-person singular presenttarballs
present participletarballing
past participletarballed
pasttarballed

Origin of tarball

From tar + ball.

Questions about tarball

What does tarball mean?
Tarball means a ball of tar or crude oil found on a beach.
What part of speech is tarball?
Tarball can be a noun or a verb.
What is the plural of tarball?
The plural of tarball is tarballs.

Words near tarball in the dictionary

  1. tarbabies
  2. tarbaby
  3. tarbadillo
  4. tarbagan
  5. tarbagans
  6. tarball
  7. tarballed
  8. tarballing
  9. tarballs
  10. Tarban
  11. Tarbat

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: tarball (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: “tarball.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/tarball. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.