tanka

1. 1.

   a form of Japanese poetry; the 1st and 3rd lines have five syllables and the 2nd, 4th, and 5th have seven syllables

   Broaderpoem
2. 2.

   a Tibetan religious painting on fabric

   Broaderpainting

Other forms of tanka

plural

tankas·

Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.

Questions about tanka

What does tanka mean?

tanka means "a form of Japanese poetry; the 1st and 3rd lines have five syllables and the 2nd, 4th, and 5th have seven syllables". That is the primary sense; the word has 2 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in tanka?

tanka has 2 syllables: tan-ka. The stress falls on "tan".

Is tanka a common word?

tanka is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.