Tarball

noun, verb

noun, verb ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    A ball of tar or crude oil found on a beach.

    "1969, Hearings By United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on the Judiciary All of us who have been to the beaches this year have encountered tarballs that stick to our feet and mess up our rugs."

  2. 2
    A file that is an archive of several other files, created using the Unix tar utility.
Verb
  1. 1
    To archive into a tarball. transitive

Synonyms

All synonyms
tarfile

Example

More examples

"1969, Hearings By United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on the Judiciary All of us who have been to the beaches this year have encountered tarballs that stick to our feet and mess up our rugs."

Etymology

From tar + ball.

Related phrases

crude oil

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