Turkish2 syllablesSecond Ottoman sultan
Meaning: great khan; a ruler above rulers.
Orhan
One Orhan turned his father's frontier lordship into a state. Another won Turkey's first Nobel Prize in Literature. The name has range.
| Origin | Turkish — han, khan, with a first element traditionally read as or, great or high |
|---|---|
| Meaning | Traditionally glossed as great khan. The second half is certain; the first half is the part scholars argue about |
| Pronunciation | or-HAHN, stress on the second syllable, and the h fully sounded — not swallowed as in English "honour" |
| Popularity | Outside the current U.S. top 100; in Turkey a very common name for men born mid-century and a quieter choice now |
| Variants | Orxan in Azerbaijani, Orkhan in English transcription. Orhun, from the Orkhon valley, is a different name and not a spelling of this one |
| Nicknames | None standard |
| First coinage | The earliest surviving Ottoman coins were struck in Orhan's name in the 1320s — one of the marks of a state rather than a war band |
History & meaning
Orhan I, who died in about 1362, inherited a small frontier principality from his father and handed on something recognisably a state. He took Bursa in 1326 and made it a capital, took İznik — the Byzantine Nicaea — in 1331, put his name on coinage, and organised the first salaried Ottoman infantry. In 1346 he married Theodora, daughter of the Byzantine claimant John VI Kantakouzenos, and the alliance took Ottoman troops across the Dardanelles as allies; by 1354 they held Gallipoli and did not leave. Everything the dynasty became in the six centuries afterwards rests on that generation's work, and the family's own story is told on our page for Osman, his father.
The etymology is less settled than the history. Everyone agrees on han, the ruler word that also stands behind Hakan and Kaan. The first syllable is usually read as an Old Turkic element meaning great or high, which yields the standard gloss "great khan", but other readings have been proposed and none is conclusive — take "traditionally glossed" seriously here. What is not in doubt is what the name means in modern Turkey, which is literature. Orhan Veli Kanık launched the Garip movement in 1941 with two friends and stripped Turkish poetry of its ornament in about ten years before dying at thirty-six. Orhan Kemal wrote the novels of the Adana cotton fields and the Istanbul back streets. Orhan Pamuk won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006, the first Turkish writer to do so. And Orhan Gencebay more or less invented arabesk. That is an unusual amount of culture for one name to carry.
Why parents choose it
It has imperial history without sounding pompous, because in Turkey it has been an ordinary name for so long. It is also the rare Turkish name a foreign reader may already have met, thanks to Pamuk, and it is spelled and pronounced almost the same in every language that has borrowed it.
Middle names for Orhan
The ‑han ending rules out anything that rhymes with it, which knocks out a good part of the Turkish stock. Orhan Kemal is a whole novelist on its own; Orhan Ali, Orhan Timur and Orhan Efe all keep the vowels moving. See the middle names guide for why the rhyme problem is worse spoken than written.
Famous Orhans
Orhan Pamuk's My Name Is Red and Snow are the most widely translated Turkish novels ever written. Orhan Veli Kanık's short, plain, funny poems are still the first modern verse Turkish children are given. Orhan Gencebay, singer, composer and bağlama player, sold records in numbers no Turkish musician has matched since.
Consider instead
Osman is the father and the founder, and the heavier of the two names. Murat is Orhan's own son, the third sultan, with a meaning as plain as a wish. Kaan gives you the imperial register in a single syllable and no biography attached.