Turk

How to spell turk

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce turk

What does turk mean?

1. nounA native or inhabitant of Turkey, or a person of Turkish descent.

Turk in a sentence

• As a proud turk, he often spoke about the history of Istanbul.

• The documentary followed one young turk who had moved to Berlin for work.

Where does turk come from?

Language of origin: Other

This word comes ultimately from the Turkic self-designation Türk, the name a large family of Central Asian peoples used for themselves; its earliest recorded meaning is debated but is often glossed as 'strong' or simply as the tribal name itself. It travelled westward through Persian and Arabic usage, then into medieval Latin as Turcus and into Old French as Turc, before entering English in the late 1300s. For centuries English writers used it broadly for the peoples of the Ottoman Empire, and only later did it settle into its modern, narrower sense of a native or inhabitant of Turkey. The same root lies behind 'Turkic' and 'Turkish', and, by a roundabout route involving the bird's mistaken geographic origin, it is even linked in folk history to the word 'turkey'. Because the spelling is short and phonetic, the main thing to remember is the single final k and the absence of any silent letters.

How the word is built

• Turk (from Turkic Türk: a member of the Turkic peoples); no affixes, a single root noun