Turkish boy names
A Turkish birth register splits down a line that most name lists ignore. On one side are native Turkic words — Alp, Kaan, Yiğit, Demir — several of them readable off an eighth-century monument. On the other are Arabic and Persian names that arrived with Islam and were reshaped by Turkish sound until Muhammad became Mehmet. This page keeps the two apart, because that division is the whole story of modern Turkish naming.
Turkish names in the United States
No Turkish name is in the SSA's 2025 top 100, and none is close, so this page carries no rank numbers. These five have simply reached English-speaking readers by other routes — a children's novel, an anime, a medieval poet, a fourteenth-century conqueror.
- Aslanahs-LAHNTurkish
Lion, and nothing more elaborate than that. C.S. Lewis took the word straight from Turkish for the lion of Narnia, and said so.
- Ereneh-RENTurkish
One who reaches. In Anatolian Sufism, erenler are those who have arrived at God. English-language readers meet it through Attack on Titan, which should be said plainly.
- Emreem-REHTurkish
Companion, friend, bard. Yunus Emre, writing plain Turkish verse in the thirteenth century, is the reason it is a name at all.
- KaanKAHNTurkish
Khan of khans. Modern Turkish phonology swallowing the soft g of kağan, the imperial title carved on the Orkhon stones in 732.
- Timurtee-MOORTurkish
Iron. Also the man Europe called Tamerlane, who built an empire from Delhi to Anatolia and left towers of skulls behind him — worth knowing before you choose it.
Traditional names: the native Turkic layer
Turkic vocabulary, most of it pre-Islamic, and much of it back in use only since the twentieth century. The Ottoman registry ran on Arabic and Persian; these names were waiting in the chronicles and the steppe inscriptions until parents went looking.
- AlpAHLPTurkish
Hero — a man who had proved it. Readable off the Orkhon inscriptions of about 732, the oldest substantial texts in any Turkic language.
- Alparslanahl-par-SLAHNTurkish
Heroic lion, alp plus arslan. The Seljuk sultan who beat the Byzantines at Manzikert in 1071 and opened Anatolia to Turkish settlement.
- Hakanhah-KAHNTurkish
Emperor; the ruler other rulers answer to. The same word as Kaan, arriving by a different door — the Persian and Arabic chronicle spelling, which supplied the h.
- Tarkantar-KAHNTurkish
A privileged rank among the Göktürks, carrying tax exemption. Revived not by scholars but by a 1967 comic strip, and then by the pop singer.
- Yiğityee-EETTurkish
A brave young man; the courage is inside the definition. Unlike most of this list it never left ordinary speech, so it sounds current rather than excavated.
- Orhanor-HAHNTurkish
Traditionally glossed great khan, though only the second element is certain. Orhan I turned a frontier principality into a state; four major writers have carried the name since.
- Efeeh-FEHTurkish
The chief of a zeybek band in the Aegean mountains — outlaws by the state's reckoning, local authority by the villages'. In family speech, big brother.
- Ozanoh-ZAHNTurkish
Bard. The Oghuz word for the minstrel who arrives at the end of each episode of the Book of Dede Korkut to name the hero and bless the house.
- BerkBEHRKTurkish
Solid, firm, sturdy. One syllable, no diacritics, nothing for a foreign form to mangle.
- Berkaybehr-KYTurkish
Berk plus ay, the moon: the firm moon. Turkish builds these compounds freely, and ay is the most productive second element of them all.
- Koraykoh-RYTurkish
Ember moon — the moon burning low and red. The same ay compound with kor, a live coal, in front of it.
- Tolgatol-GAHTurkish
Helmet. A plain object word, of the kind Turkish parents began choosing in quantity from the 1960s.
- Yavuzyah-VOOZTurkish
Stern, resolute, formidable. The epithet of Selim I, and a word that in older Turkish could mean both admirable and harsh.
- Demirdeh-MEERTurkish
Iron — the modern shape of the same word as Timur. Its main career is as a surname, which gives it a faintly deliberate feel as a first name.
Arabic and Persian names in Turkish use
An Arabic name in Turkish is a Turkish name. The vowels move, the throat consonants disappear, the stress goes to the last syllable, and the result often sounds nothing like the original — Ömer is not the English OH-mar. Two of these came in from Persian rather than Arabic, and Turkish rebuilt one of them from the inside.
- Mehmetmeh-METTurkish
Praised. Turkish reserved Muhammed for the Prophet and let pronunciation produce Mehmet for everyone else — which is why the country has generations of Mehmets and almost no Muhammeds among their grandfathers.
- Ömeruh-MEHRTurkish
Long-lived, flourishing. Arabic Umar with the opening throat consonant simply gone and the vowel fronted into ö. Passport systems strip the dots and give you Omer.
- Osmanos-MAHNTurkish
The Turkish form of Arabic Uthman. Osman I's followers were the Osmanlı, and that is where the English word Ottoman comes from.
- Muratmoo-RAHTTurkish
Wish, desire, the thing that is sought. Five Ottoman sultans, and a staple of Turkish birth registers ever since.
- Selimseh-LEEMTurkish
Sound, safe, untroubled — the Turkish shape of Arabic Salim. Three sultans, the first of whom took Egypt and the caliphal claim in 1517.
- Kemalkeh-MAHLTurkish
Perfection, completeness, maturity. Mustafa Kemal was given the second name at military school for his mathematics.
- Keremkeh-REMTurkish
Generosity itself. Most languages borrowed the Arabic adjective karim; Turkish took the noun karam as well and handed the quality over whole.
- Halilhah-LEELTurkish
Close friend, intimate companion. Arabic Khalil, the epithet of the prophet Ibrahim, who is called the friend of God.
- MustafaMOOS-tah-fahTurkish
The chosen one — an epithet of the Prophet Muhammad, and one of the commonest men's names in Turkey.
- Cihanjee-HAHNTurkish
The world. Persian jahan, the same element in the Mughal title Jahangir; the Turkish c is pronounced like an English j.
- MertMEHRTTurkish
Straight with people: keeps his word, says the difficult thing to your face. Borrowed from Persian mard, a man, and rebuilt by Turkish as a moral word — the opposite, namert, means treacherous.
Weather, landscape and republican coinages
The most recent vein, and the most urban. These are common nouns every speaker understands instantly, and two of them could not have been given as names before the 1940s.
- Boraboh-RAHTurkish
A squall that gets up fast off the water and is gone in an hour. Despite the company it keeps here, it is not native Turkic — it is a Mediterranean loan, the same word as the Adriatic bora, and behind that Greek Boreas, the north wind.
- Ayazah-YAHZTurkish
The particular dry cold of a clear, windless night. Turkish keeps it separate from soğuk, ordinary cold, and so do Azerbaijani, Kazakh and Tatar.
- Barışbah-RUSHTurkish
Peace — from barışmak, to make up after an argument. Not tranquillity, then: a settlement reached. The Ottoman word for peace was the Arabic sulh.
- Özgüruhz-GOORTurkish
Free, independent. A language-reform coinage that replaced Arabic hür, so the name has no saint, no sultan and no folk hero behind it — just republican vocabulary.
- Doğandoh-AHNTurkish
Falcon; and, read as a verb, born or rising. Turkish enjoys names that work both ways at once.
How Turkish naming works
The date to know is 1932, when Atatürk founded the Türk Dil Kurumu and set the language reform going: Arabic and Persian borrowings were to be replaced wherever a Turkic word could be found, revived or built. It worked on the vocabulary — modern Turkish says özgürlük for freedom and keeps hürriyet for period flavour — and parents followed the same instinct into the registry. Reaching past the Ottoman name stock to the pre-Islamic steppe gave the country Alp, Kaan, Tarkan and Yiğit, which is why an eighth-century word for a hero is an ordinary thing to call a child in Ankara today. Two years later the Surname Law of 1934 obliged every citizen to register a hereditary family name, and an entire country picked one inside a few years, mostly from trades, metals and landscape — which is why Demir, iron, is far commoner at the end of a Turkish name than at the start.
None of that displaced the older layer, and a page that treats Turkish naming as purely Turkic gets it wrong. Mehmet, Mustafa, Ali and Hasan remain among the most-given names in the country. What Turkish did was absorb them rather than borrow them: the sounds Turkish does not have were dropped, the vowels were refitted to Turkish harmony, and the results became names in their own right with their own histories. The clearest case is the convention that reserved Muhammed for the Prophet and left Mehmet for ordinary bearers — a distinction that produced Mehmetçik, little Mehmet, the affectionate word for the Turkish soldier, fixed in the language by Gallipoli. Very few given names anywhere have generated a common noun for an entire army. For the source traditions, see Arabic names and Persian names, or the whole set at names by origin.