Turkish

How to spell turkish

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce turkish

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does turkish mean?

1. adjectiveRelating to Turkey, its people, language, or culture.

Turkish in a sentence

• The cafe serves strong turkish coffee in tiny copper pots.

• She spent the summer learning turkish grammar before her move to Istanbul.

Where does turkish come from?

Language of origin: Other

This adjective is built from the noun Turk plus the native English suffix -ish, which attaches to nationalities and origins to mean 'belonging to' or 'characteristic of', as in British, Spanish, and Finnish. The name Turk itself came into English in the late Middle Ages, travelling through Old French and medieval Latin (Turcus) from a Persian and Arabic form, Turk, used for the Turkic peoples of central Asia. The ultimate source is generally traced to a Turkic self-designation whose older sense may have meant something like 'strong' or simply named the people themselves. By the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the adjective described anything connected with the Ottoman lands, and over time it settled on the modern Republic of Turkey, its language, and its culture. The spelling trap is small but real: the suffix is plain -ish on the single root Turk, with no doubled letter and no e, so the word is simply Turk plus ish.

How the word is built

• Turk (the people and country of Turkey)
• -ish (adjective suffix meaning 'belonging to' or 'in the manner of')