RussianTurkic rootLiterary
Meaning: lion — from the Turkic arslan, not from Greek or Slavic.
Ruslan
| Origin | Russian and Ukrainian, from Turkic arslan, "lion" — a steppe loan rather than a church import |
|---|---|
| Meaning | Lion. The Turkic arslan lost its first vowel on the way north and surfaced in Russian folk literature as Yeruslan |
| Pronunciation | roos-LAHN, stress on the second syllable, both vowels open |
| Popularity | Outside the current U.S. top 100; ordinary in Russia and Ukraine and very common in Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, the North Caucasus and Azerbaijan |
| Variants | Aslan, Arslan, Yeruslan, Ruslans, Rustam |
| Nicknames | Rusya, Rus, Ruslanchik |
| Name day | None. Ruslan is not an Orthodox calendar name, so Orthodox families give the child a second, saint's name at baptism |
History & meaning
Two Russian names mean lion and neither of them is Slavic. Lev is Greek in disguise; Ruslan is Turkic in the open. Arslan is the plain word for lion across the Turkic languages, and it turns up wherever Turkic power did — in Turkish Aslan, and in the eleventh-century Seljuk sultan Alp Arslan, "heroic lion", who took the Byzantine emperor prisoner at Manzikert in 1071. Centuries of trade, tribute and war between the Slavs and the steppe moved the word north, where it settled into the Russian chapbook tradition as Yeruslan Lazarevich, a wandering strongman whose story is itself a much-retold version of the Persian hero Rustam, passed along by Turkic storytellers before it was ever printed in Moscow.
What turned a folk-tale name into a real one was a book. In 1820 the twenty-year-old Pushkin published Ruslan and Lyudmila, a mock-epic in which a knight rides out to recover a bride snatched from her wedding feast by the dwarf sorcerer Chernomor; Glinka made an opera of it in 1842 and it has never left the Russian repertoire. Ruslan became a given name off the back of that poem, which is why it has no saint and no feast day — unusual for a Russian name and worth knowing before a christening. It is also one of the few names used identically in Russian and Ukrainian, and in the Turkic-speaking republics it is not a literary borrowing at all but the home word for the animal.
Why parents choose it
Two open syllables, no consonant cluster, nothing for an English speaker to trip on. Ruslan reads as Russian, Central Asian and Caucasian all at once, which for a family with more than one of those in it is the point rather than a complication.
Middle names for Ruslan
The name ends on a strong open syllable, so a softer middle balances it: Ruslan Amir, Ruslan Nikolai, Ruslan Emil, Ruslan David. See the middle names guide for the underlying method.
Famous Ruslans
Ruslan Ponomariov of Ukraine became FIDE world chess champion in 2002 at eighteen. Ruslan Provodnikov, from a Mansi family in western Siberia, held the WBO light-welterweight title in 2013 and fought some of the loudest rounds of that decade. Ruslan Nigmatullin kept goal for Russia at the 2002 World Cup.
Consider instead
Aslan is the Turkish word undisguised, and carries Narnia with it in English. Lev is the same animal in one Russian syllable. Alparslan keeps the full compound, heroic lion, and the sultan who bore it.