A tsarina is a woman who ruled Russia in the old days, before 1917 — or the wife of a tsar. Those are two quite different things, and the word covers both, which is worth stopping on. Catherine the Great was a tsarina who really ran the country and made the decisions. But most tsarinas in history were simply married to the man in charge and had no power at all. English does not separate these two with different words, so when you meet 'tsarina' in a book you have to look at the sentence around it to know which kind of woman you are reading about. You will also see it spelled 'czarina' and 'tzarina' — same word, and older books often prefer 'czarina'. All of them are pronounced the same way, roughly 'zah-REE-nah'; the first letter is silent, which surprises almost everyone. Another word for the same person is 'tsaritsa', which is closer to what Russians actually say. 'Tsarina' is a history word — you meet it in books, museums, and films about Russia. Nobody is a tsarina today. Unlike 'tsar', which modern journalists borrow for living people (a 'drug tsar' is a government official in charge of drug policy), 'tsarina' has mostly stayed in the past. You do sometimes see it used loosely and playfully for a powerful woman in fashion or business, but that is a small, jokey use, not the main one.

沙皇皇后／女沙皇（俄國）。注意中文常把兩種身分分開講：真正掌權的女性統治者是「女皇」，沙皇的太太是「皇后」，英文一個字都能指。