A refractory wavelength selective thermal emitter is experimentally realized by the excitation of Tamm plasmon polaritons (TPPs) between a titanium nitride (TiN) thin film and a distributed Bragg reflector (DBR). The absorptance reaches nearly unity at ≈3.73 μm with the bandwidth of 0.36 μm in the experiment. High temperature stabilities are confirmed up to 500 and 1000 °C in ambient and in vacuum, respectively. When the TiN TPP structure is compared to the TiN–insulator–TiN (TiN-metal–insulator–metal (MIM)) structure, the former shows higher Q-factor, which indicates the advantage of choosing the TiN TTP structure against the MIM structure. The proposed refractory TiN TPP structure is lithography-free and scalable, which paves a way for large scale thermal emitters in practical usage. © 2020 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim