Turkish2 syllablesA dictionary word
Meaning: peace.
Barış
| Origin | Turkish — the everyday noun barış, peace, from the verb barışmak, to be reconciled |
|---|---|
| Meaning | Peace, and specifically peace made: the settling of a quarrel between two sides rather than a serene inner state |
| Pronunciation | bah-RUSH — stress on the second syllable, and the final ş is the sh of shop |
| Popularity | Outside the current U.S. top 100 and barely registered there; an ordinary name in Turkey since the 1950s |
| Variants | Baris and Barish in English-language spellings; Barışcan as a double name; the surname Barış also exists |
| Nicknames | None. Turkish keeps the name whole and adds affection with a suffix instead |
| The letter ş | ş is s with a cedilla, one of the six letters Turkish added when it took up the Latin alphabet in 1928 |
History & meaning
Barış did not have to be excavated from a chronicle. It is the word for peace — the one that runs in newspaper headlines and appears in the name of every peace treaty Turkey has signed — lifted straight into the birth registry. Its root is the verb barışmak, to make up, which is what two people do after an argument. That gives the name a more practical sense than the English word carries: not tranquillity, but a settlement reached.
Names like this are recent. The Ottoman registry ran on Arabic and Persian stock, and the word an Ottoman writer used for peace was the Arabic sulh. Once the language reform of the 1930s pushed native Turkish vocabulary back to the centre of the language — the story is told in full on our page for Alp — the registry opened to plain Turkish nouns, and a generation of parents began giving sons names you could look up in a dictionary rather than trace in a genealogy. Özgür, free. Demir, iron. Barış, peace. It has been in steady use ever since, most heavily among Turks born from the 1960s onward.
Why parents choose it
It is a wish said out loud, and an unusually legible one — nobody in Turkey needs the meaning explained, and nobody abroad finds it hard once they have heard it. The catch is the spelling. Strip the cedilla for a passport or a web address and Barış becomes Baris, which no English speaker will say correctly on the first attempt.
Middle names for Barış
The soft ending takes a hard second name well: Barış Alp, Barış Mert, Barış Kerem, Barış Eren. Barış Alp puts peace next to a hero and somehow neither cancels the other. For the general method, see the middle names guide.
Famous Barışes
Barış Manço, born in Istanbul in 1943 and dead at fifty-six in 1999, is the one every Turk names first: a founder of Anatolian rock, a songwriter with a long moustache and heavy rings, and later the host of 7'den 77'ye, a television programme aimed at everyone from seven to seventy-seven and watched by roughly that range. His house in Moda is now a museum. The rock singer Barış Akarsu, who won the talent contest Akademi Türkiye and died in a car crash in 2007 at twenty-eight, is remembered nearly as warmly. The footballer Barış Alper Yılmaz plays for Galatasaray and Turkey.
Consider instead
Özgür comes from the same shelf of plain modern nouns and means free. Eren is gentler in sound and carries a quiet spiritual sense. Emre keeps the soft consonants and adds a thirteenth-century poet.