Tess

//tɛs// name

name ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Proper Noun
  1. 1
    A diminutive of the female given name Teresa.

    "Cynthia and Melinda, reduced to Cindy and Mindy, as Carella had dreaded would happen from the moment she named them. Her older daughter had fared better. Tess, modern and sleek for Teresa, which conjured up cobblestoned streets in a mountain village in Potenza."

  2. 2
    A surname from German.
  3. 3
    Initialism of Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, a planned space telescope for NASA's Explorers program. abbreviation, alt-of, initialism

    "The dedicated time Cheops spent observing the star helped astronomers iron out the mixed signals from the TESS data to determine how many planets were crossing in front of the star and the resonance of their orbits."

Example

More examples

"The study of worlds outside our solar system will be continued by future spacecraft, such as NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and James Webb Space Telescope."

Etymology

Borrowed from German Tess, a variant of Tesch.

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