Turkic Names by Origin

How origin labels work

Every published name can carry one or more origin rows, each with a free-text label such as "Arabic", "Persian + Turkic" or "Proto-Turkic" and a sentence that explains it. For the groups on this page we read those labels part by part: a name belongs to a group when any part of a label matches it. 4 groups have at least 12 published names and a page of their own.

Labels that name a Turkic language or stage, such as Old Turkic, Kipchak, Chagatai or Ottoman Turkish, are grouped under Turkic. Labels that match no group, for example when the origin is unknown, are not shown on these pages, but those names remain on the rest of the site.

Why the groups overlap

A name that joins a Turkic word to an Arabic one is counted under both Turkic and Arabic, so the numbers on this page add up to more than the number of names. That is intended: it lets you find every name that has an Arabic part, whether or not it also has a Turkic one. Each origin page shows how many of its names are pure and how many are mixed.

Counts also change over time. Whenever a name is published, corrected or removed, the groups update, and the last data update date in the box below shows the most recent change.

Reading origin together with meaning

The meaning label tells you how well a meaning is supported, and the origin label tells you where the words come from; the two are separate. Of the 1,164 names with a meaning, 715 are Documented by a cited source, 449 are Likely and 0 are Editorial. A name can have a well-documented meaning and an origin that is only an editorial reading, or the other way round, and the name page shows both.

• Use an origin page when you want a certain vocabulary, for example names built on Persian words for flowers or on Turkic words for animals.
• Use a language page when you want the names a specific community uses.
• Use a meaning page when the sense of the name matters more than its roots.

What this page cannot tell you

Origin groups say nothing about how common a name is. We do not publish popularity figures, rankings or trends, because we have no official birth-name statistics for these languages, so a large group is a large list of names and not a list of popular ones.

Smaller groups such as Hebrew (10), Mongolic (10), Russian (7), French (6) and Latin (3) have fewer than 12 names, so they do not get a page of their own yet. Their names are still reachable through search and the filters on the list pages.

Questions and answers