thumb|upright=1.4|Share of Tatars in regions of Russia, 2010 census
The Tatars (, ) are a group of Turkic speaking peoples found across Eastern Europe and Northern Asia who bear the name "Tatar".
Initially, the ethnonym Tatar possibly referred to the Tatar confederation. That confederation was eventually incorporated into the Mongol Empire when Genghis Khan unified the various steppe tribes. Historically, the term Tatar (or Tartar) was applied by western cartographers to anyone from the vast Northern and Central Asian landmass then known as Tartary, a term that was falsely conflated with the Mongol Empire. More recently, the term has come to refer more narrowly to related ethnic groups who call themselves Tatars.
By far the largest group amongst the Tatars are the Volga Tatars, native to the Volga-Ural region (Tatarstan and Bashkortostan) of European Russia, who for this reason are often also known as Tatars in Russian. They compose 53% of Tatarstan's population. Their language is known as the Tatar language. , there were an estimated 5.3 million ethnic Tatars in Russia.
While also speaking languages belonging to different Kipchak sub-groups, genetic studies have shown that the three main groups of Tatars (Volga, Crimean, and Siberian) are apparently unrelated, and thus their formation occurred independently of one another, but it is possible that at least one of the Tatar groups had cultural influence mainly from the times of the Golden Horde.
Many noble families in the Tsardom of Russia and Russian Empire had Tatar origins.
Etymology
thumb|200px|[[Orkhon inscriptions in Old Turkic (replica)]]
thumb|Ottoman miniature of the 1566 [[Siege of Szigetvár|Szigetvár campaign showing Ottoman troops and Crimean Tatars as vanguard]]
Tatar became a name for populations of the former Golden Horde in Europe, such as those of the former Kazan, Crimean, Astrakhan, Qasim, and Siberian Khanates. The form Tartar has its origins in either Latin or French, coming to Western European languages from Turkish and the Persian (, "mounted messenger"). From the beginning, the extra r was present in the Western forms and according to the Oxford English Dictionary this was most likely due to an association with Tartarus.