A brief review on the thermal plasma synthesis of nano-sized powders is presented according to the application materials, such as, metals, ceramics, glasses, carbonaceous materials and other functional composites, such as, supported metal catalyst and core-shell structured nano materials. As widely adopted plasma sources available for thermal plasma synthesis of nanosized powders, three kinds of plasma torches, such as transferred and non-transferred DC and RF plasma torches, are introduced with the main features of each torch system. In the basis of the described torch features and the properties of suggested materials, application results including synthesis mechanism are reviewed in this paper.