name, noun, verb, slang ·Common ·High school level

Definitions

Noun

1. 1
   A small amount; a little bit. informal

   "Could you lean the picture to the left just a tad more?"

2. 2
   Initialism of tobacco, alcohol and drugs. abbreviation, alt-of, initialism, uncountable
3. 3
   a slight amount or degree of difference wordnet
4. 4
   A street boy; an urchin. US, dated, slang
5. 5
   Initialism of transboundary animal disease. abbreviation, alt-of, countable, initialism

Verb

1. 1
   simple past and past participle of TA form-of, participle, past

Proper Noun

1. 1
   A diminutive of the male given name Thaddeus or Thaddaeus.
2. 2
   Tadcaster. UK, colloquial

   "There's a new pub opening in Tad next week."

Synonyms

All synonyms

miteaceatomaughtbairnbissel

Antonyms

All antonyms

lotoodles

Example

More examples

"One day in 1906, a newspaper cartoonist named Tad Dorgan went to a baseball game."

Etymology

1877, ‘young or small child’, probably a shortened form of tadpole. The extended meaning ‘small amount’ is first recorded 1915.

Related phrases

a tadgiven name

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.