Turkish2 syllablesFrom a poet
Meaning: companion; friend; bard.
Emre
| Origin | Turkish — emre, an old word of the Anatolian dervish brotherhoods, carried into general use by one poet |
|---|---|
| Meaning | Traditionally glossed as companion or friend, and in older Turkish as âşık: one who loves, hence a folk poet |
| Pronunciation | em-REH — the stress falls on the last syllable, as Turkish stress usually does, and the final e is a full vowel |
| Popularity | Outside the current U.S. top 100; one of the most-given Turkish boys' names of the past fifty years |
| Variants | Emrecan and Emrehan as compounds. The name is not shortened in Turkish |
| Nicknames | None standard |
| Namesake | Yunus Emre, Anatolian poet, died around 1321 — the reason the name exists |
History & meaning
Almost every Turkish boy called Emre is named, at one remove, after a single man. Yunus Emre lived in central Anatolia and died around 1321, a wandering Sufi in a century when the learned writing of the region was done in Persian and Arabic. He wrote in Turkish — the spoken kind, in folk metre, in the words villagers used — and the decision proved permanent. His poems entered the repertoire of singers and stayed there, and Turkish schoolchildren still learn lines that are seven hundred years old and completely comprehensible. Emre was not a family name; hereditary surnames did not exist in Anatolia then. It was an epithet, glossed as loving companion or friend, from the vocabulary of the dervish lodges, and it stuck to him hard enough to become a name in its own right.
The rest is reputation. Several towns claim his grave, Eskişehir and Karaman among them, and the dispute has never been settled, which is itself a measure of how much people want him. The state cultural institute Turkey opened in 2007 to teach Turkish and run its libraries abroad — the equivalent of the Goethe-Institut or the Institut français — is called the Yunus Emre Institute. As a given name Emre came into heavy use in the second half of the twentieth century, helped by the same preference for native Turkish over Arabic and Persian that revived Alp and Kaan. Unlike those two, it never needed reviving. It came down through poetry rather than out of an inscription.
Why parents choose it
There is no hard sound in it, which is unusual in a name stock full of them, and the associations are literary rather than martial — a rarity in Turkish naming, where most of the meanings involve heroes, iron or lions. It also crosses borders unusually well: no diacritics, no unfamiliar letters, and European speakers manage it on the first attempt.
Middle names for Emre
Emre is more often the second name than the first in Turkey — Ali Emre, Mehmet Emre, Alp Emre. Leading with it, the pairings that work put a consonant against the open ending: Emre Kaan, Emre Berk, Emre Tolga, Emre Demir. See the middle names guide.
Famous Emres
Emre Belözoğlu, a small and famously combative midfielder, played for Galatasaray, Internazionale, Newcastle United and Fenerbahçe and was capped around a hundred times for Turkey. Emre Can, born in Frankfurt to Turkish parents, has played for Bayern Munich, Liverpool, Juventus and Borussia Dortmund, and for Germany. The rock singer Emre Aydın won Turkey's first Akademi Türkiye contest and has recorded steadily since.
Consider instead
Ozan is the Turkish word for a bard outright, and the closest thing to Emre's literary register. Kerem comes from a folk romance and is equally soft in the mouth. Eren shares the two-syllable shape and the quiet spiritual sense.