Turkmen
adj, name, noun ·Uncommon ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 A person from Turkmenistan or of Turkmen descent.
"The conquest took 16 years and ended in 1885 in a battle with the Afghans on the banks of the Murghab. During this period, the Turkmens offered the Russians stubborn resistance […]"
- 2 plural of Turkman form-of, plural, proscribed
- 3 the Turkic language spoken by the Turkoman wordnet
- 4 a member of a Turkic people living in Turkmenistan and neighboring areas wordnet
- 1 Of, from, or pertaining to Turkmenistan, the Turkmen people or the Turkmen language. not-comparable
- 1 of or relating to or characteristic of Turkmenistan or its people or culture wordnet
- 1 A Turkic language of the Turkmen spoken mostly in Turkmenistan.
Example
More examples"My dream is to study Turkmen in Ashgabat."
Etymology
The current majority view for the etymology of the ethnonym Türkmen or Turcoman is that it comes from Türk and the Turkic emphasizing suffix -men, meaning "'most Turkish of the Turks' or 'pure-blooded Turks.'" A folk etymology, dating back to the Middle Ages and found in al-Biruni and Mahmud al-Kashgari, instead derives the suffix -men from the Persian suffix -mānind, with the resulting word meaning "like a Turk". While formerly the dominant etymology in modern scholarship, this mixed Turkic-Persian derivation is now viewed as incorrect.
Treated as a plural of the deprecated term Turkman, influenced by English man, plural men.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.