Turkish2 syllablesA word for a poet
Meaning: bard; a minstrel who sings his own verse.
Ozan
| Origin | Turkish — ozan, the old Oghuz word for a bard, brought back into modern Turkish as the native word for a poet |
|---|---|
| Meaning | Bard, minstrel. Not a poet on paper: an ozan performs, and accompanies himself while he does it |
| Pronunciation | oh-ZAHN, stress on the second syllable; the z is fully voiced |
| Popularity | Outside the current U.S. top 100 and unknown there; a steady, modern, secular-sounding name in Turkey since the 1970s |
| Variants | None. Ozan works as a first name, a second name and a surname without changing shape |
| Nicknames | None standard |
| The instrument | The bağlama or saz, the long-necked lute the minstrels play, is the sound the word implies |
History & meaning
Among the Oghuz Turks an ozan was the man who carried the stories. The figure who frames the Book of Dede Korkut is the type: he arrives with his kopuz at the end of each episode, gives the hero his name, blesses the household and moves on. From roughly the sixteenth century the Anatolian word for that trade changed to âşık — from Arabic ʿāshiq, "the one in love", the love being human and divine at the same time — and ozan dropped out of use for three hundred years. Twentieth-century Turkish brought it back with a new job, as the native alternative to Arabic-derived şair for a poet. So the word is ancient, dead, and revived; what a Turkish speaker hears in it today is simply "poet".
The tradition behind the word is not a museum exhibit. An âşık travels, plays the bağlama, and performs verse in syllabic metre, a good deal of it improvised; the atışma is a competitive duel in which two singers answer each other line for line in front of an audience that keeps score. Karacaoğlan sang in the seventeenth century and Pir Sultan Abdal before him. Âşık Veysel, blind from childhood, died in 1973 having written songs — Kara Toprak, Uzun İnce Bir Yoldayım — that every Turk can still start. Neşet Ertaş, who died in 2012, was the last of that line to be a household name, and gatherings of âşıks still take place, most famously around Kars and Konya. A child called Ozan is named for a job that people are currently doing.
Why parents choose it
It names a vocation, and a beautiful one, which almost no other Turkish name does — the stock runs heavily to heroes, rulers and virtues. It is secular, it is short, both syllables are open and easy, and it arrives abroad with no diacritics to lose.
Middle names for Ozan
The ‑an ending is the constraint: avoid a second name that ends the same way, or the pair chimes. Ozan Kerem, Ozan Alp, Ozan Mert and Ozan Yiğit all break the pattern cleanly. The middle names guide has more on endings that fight each other.
Famous Ozans
Ozan Tufan has played more than fifty times in midfield for Turkey and won a league title with Fenerbahçe. Ozan Kabak became the youngest defender to score in the Bundesliga during his season at Stuttgart and has also played for Schalke and Liverpool. Ozan Doğulu is one of the most-credited arrangers and producers in Turkish pop, which is a pleasing thing for a man named after a musician.
Consider instead
Emre belongs to Yunus Emre, the thirteenth-century poet whose verse is the foundation of literary Turkish. Kerem is a hero of the minstrels' own repertoire. Barış comes off the same shelf of plain modern Turkish nouns and means peace.