Hungarian2 syllablesVocabulary word
Meaning: simply the Hungarian word for "wolf" — and, oddly, "the tailed one".
Farkas
| Origin | Hungarian — the ordinary noun farkas, wolf, used as a personal name |
|---|---|
| Meaning | Wolf. The word is built from farok (tail) plus the suffix -as (having), so literally "the tailed one" — widely read as a taboo substitute for an older, unspoken word |
| Pronunciation | FOR-kosh. Hungarian short a is a rounded vowel close to English o, and a lone s is always sh |
| Popularity | Outside the current U.S. top 100 and unused in America; in Hungary far commoner as a surname than as a given name, though it is legal and given |
| Variants | None in Hungarian. It has long served as the Hungarian equivalent of Wolfgang, so German Wolfgangs appear as Farkas in Hungarian records |
| Nicknames | Fari, Farkaska |
| As a surname | Farkas is one of the ten commonest family names in Hungary |
History & meaning
Most names mean something at one remove — through a dead language, a saint, a compound nobody parses any more. Farkas does not. It is the live, current, first-thing-in-the-dictionary Hungarian word for a wolf, and a Hungarian hearing it as a name hears the animal, the way an English speaker hears Wolf or Fox. Naming children for the wolf is an old Eurasian habit, and Hungarian shares it with half of Europe.
The etymology is better than the gloss. Farkas breaks into farok, tail, and -as, the suffix meaning "having one of those" — the word says, flatly, "the tailed one". It looks like the same instinct that made Slavic speakers call the bear the honey-eater and Germanic speakers call it the brown one: you do not say the real name of a dangerous animal out loud, so you describe it and hope it does not notice. The inherited word for wolf dropped out of Hungarian and the euphemism took the job permanently. The naming practice also ran the other way — from the Middle Ages Hungarian used Farkas to render German Wolfgang, which is why a Hungarian reference book lists Wolfgang von Kempelen as Kempelen Farkas.
Why parents choose it
Very few do, in Hungary, where the name is overwhelmingly a surname and using it as a first name reads as a strong statement. Abroad the appeal is different: short, blunt, meaning wolf outright, and almost nobody will guess where it is from.
Middle names for Farkas
A hard, closed name wants an open one behind it: Farkas Levente, Farkas Ábel, Farkas Bendegúz, Farkas Dániel. The middle names guide covers the general method.
Famous Farkases
Farkas Bolyai (1775–1856) taught mathematics in Marosvásárhely, corresponded with Gauss, and spent years warning his son János off the parallel postulate — advice ignored, to the permanent benefit of geometry. Farkas Kempelen (1734–1804) built the chess-playing automaton known as the Turk, which toured Europe beating all comers and concealed a human player, and also built a speaking machine that genuinely worked and is taken seriously in the history of speech synthesis.
Consider instead
Wolf is the same word with none of the spelling trouble. Ákos is the Hungarian bird name to Farkas's beast name, and much commoner. Szabolcs holds onto the hard consonants and the final -s.