Editorial standards

Three kinds of meaning, clearly labelled

• Documented: the meaning is stated by a cited source and, for compound names, confirmed by the meaning of each part. The numbered references at the bottom of the page say which claim each source supports.
• Likely: the source supports the reading but does not confirm it independently, or the meaning is read from the name's documented elements (for example ай ‘moon’ + гүл ‘flower’) because no separate etymology for the name itself is recorded.
• Editorial: the meaning comes from TurkicNames' own editorial research and is not yet linked to a cited source. These meanings are reviewed and upgraded to Documented when a source is found.

Where sources disagree or give only a folk explanation, the meaning is marked Uncertain and shown as an open question.

Sources we use

Each statement on a name page (a meaning, an origin, use in a language, a spelling) is stored separately with its own provenance. Cited sources are licensed open sources: Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 4.0) for etymologies and given-name entries, Wikidata (CC0) for given-name items and labels, Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0) for background on languages and alphabets, the KazPER Kazakh name list (CC BY 4.0) for Kazakh usage and spellings, and the Dictionary of Uyghur Names (MIT licence) for Uyghur entries, whose Uyghur glosses we quote and whose English renderings are marked as translated by TurkicNames. Commercial baby-name sites are not used as sources.

When a name is published

• it has a meaning that is Documented, Likely (built from cited elements) or Editorial (high or medium confidence in our own research);
• its use as a given name is recorded in at least one Turkic language;
• it has a description written for this site (we never copy source sentences);
• no cited source contradicts the meaning.

These rules are checked automatically for every entry. Pages that are published but still thin are kept out of search engines until they are richer. Entries a researcher has put on hold stay unpublished.

Origin is not usage

Many names used in Turkic languages come from Arabic or Persian. We record where a name comes from separately from the languages that use it, and we list a language only when the name is recorded in it.

Spellings

Forms are stored exactly as written, in their original script, and romanizations are labelled with their system. Some Cyrillic spellings of Uzbek names are conversions by fixed rule and are labelled as such. The transliteration tool and the search index use fixed, published letter tables; their results are rule-based and never replace a stored spelling.

No invented numbers

We publish no popularity rankings or name counts that do not come from our own database or from cited official statistics. Not available yet: popularity statistics. We do not publish rankings, trends or claims that a name is rare or common until we can base them on official birth-name statistics, and we will keep each country and year separate.

Corrections

Every name page has a “Suggest a correction” form. Suggestions go to a private review queue; nothing changes on the page until the claim has been rechecked. See Corrections.