Turk

surname · English · Latin script

Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise

Turk is a surname, most frequently recorded in Germany. In Dominica it is the most common surname. It appears chiefly in English and Croatian, written in the Latin script. Recorded meaning: (i) medieval nickname for someone thought to resemble a Turk; (ii) from the medieval personal name Turk; (iii) shortened form of McTurk; (iv) Jewish surname denoting a Jew from Turkey or the Ottoman E.

rarermore common
  • DMDominica1 in 82◐
  • DEGermany1 in 11K
  • NLNetherlands1 in 16K

carrying the name, one hue, darker where it is more common. Hover a country for its figure.

≈19K ●

across 13 countries

Sources
348 ●

120K records

Official registry-verified

1 in 652 ◐

Slovenia

Spellings & scripts●

2 other spellings are counted as the same name:

Locally spelled Türk in DE Germany, TR Türkiye, AT Austria and 2 more.

Spellings marked ● are how people bearing the name write it in our records; ○ marks a model's transliteration. Click a spelling to open its page.

Meaning & origin●

(i) medieval nickname for someone thought to resemble a Turk; (ii) from the medieval personal name Turk; (iii) shortened form of McTurk; (iv) Jewish surname denoting a Jew from Turkey or the Ottoman Empire.

Sources 1

  • Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]

Attested across 21 languages in the etymology graph.

Where in the world●

Sorted by bearers counted by national registers, records where none counts.

Where Turk is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
DE Germany#91710,4179.9K rec.——Türk88
US United States—10,35482K rec.1 in 32K10KTurk348
GB United Kingdom—4,5374.2K rec.——Turk104
SI Slovenia—3,227△53 rec.1 in 6523.2KTurk42
AU Australia—2,7322.6K rec.——Turk94
CA Canada—2,1772.2K rec.——Turk85
HR Croatia—1,765—1 in 2.4K1.8K——
TR Türkiye—1,7641.3K rec.——Türk44
DM Dominica#11,5728.4K rec.——Turk1
IR Iran—1,296106 rec.——Turk10
IN India—1,165△355 rec.1 in 1.1M1.2KTurk34
SY Syria—1,1561.3K rec.——Turk12

Country figures for a list of names, at full precision, are available under licence rather than by scraping this table. How that works.

Languages●

  • English95K60%
  • Croatian13K8%
  • French5.7K4%
  • Spanish5.5K4%
  • Arabic4.5K3%
Show as table
Languages in which the name is recorded
NameRecordsNote
English94,84860%
Croatian12,9338%
French5,7424%
Spanish5,5484%
Arabic4,4793%

Language is read off each record's context, not declared by the bearer; a share is of all records for this spelling.

Other names spelled this way◐

Turk is also recorded as 7 other names, grouped separately because the records behind them do not connect to the one described above.

  • Croatian surname15K records spelled Turk46 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Croatia, Ukraine, Russia, United States

    Languages: Croatian, Ukrainian, Russian

    Also written Турок, Turok, Турк, Тюрк, Türk

  • Spanish surname8.3K records spelled Turk12 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in United States, Argentina, Türkiye, Brazil

    Languages: Spanish, Portuguese, Italian

    Also written Türk, Tűrk, Tūrk, ̈turk, Tǘrk

  • French surname6.2K records spelled Turk7 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in France, United States, Türkiye, Spain

    Languages: French, Catalan

    Also written Türk, Tůrk, Tūrk, Tùrk

  • Turkish surname6.0K records spelled Turk19 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Türkiye, Israel, Syria, United States

    Languages: Turkish, Hebrew, Arabic

    Also written Türk, טורק, Turek, T'Ürk, Tūrk

  • a separate surname5.1K records spelled Turk3 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in United States, India, Türkiye, Pakistan

    Also written Türk, Tu̇rk

  • Hindi surname3.6K records spelled Turk4 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in India, United States, Pakistan, United Kingdom

    Languages: Hindi, Urdu

    Also written Tűrk, Tŭrk

  • Polish surname570 records spelled Turk2 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Poland, United States, Türkiye, Netherlands

    Also written Türk

51 further groups record this spelling and are not listed here.

Grouping is the name graph's, not a register's: two spellings join a group when the evidence links them, so a group is a claim about the records rather than about the people.

Other recorded senses●

Turk is also recorded in 5 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.

  • In English, nickname from OFr turc ‘Turk’; first attested Turch, Turcus 1066 DB (C)

    as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames

  • In English, A speaker of the various Turkic languages.

    as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)

  • In Italian, Variante di Turchi

    as a nameDizionario dei cognomi italiani

  • In Irish, Either for MacTurk (Mac Tuirc), a Scottish name found in Antrim, or more often an abbreviated form of Turkington

    as a nameThe Surnames of Ireland

  • In Afrikaans, Turk (person from Turkey or of Turkish descent)

    as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)

Ordered by how much of this spelling's record each language holds, so a sense from a language the name is barely used in sits last rather than first.

Over time●

05010015019001920194019601980

Show as table
Turk in INSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000), France, 1891–1991
Yearrecords
18913
19015
19118
192117
193132
194143
195142
196152
197184
1981125
1991142

FR INSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000) — 11 years between 1891–1991. One register's own figures, never a sum across registers: two registers counting the same people would double them.

Notable people with this name●

18501900195020002050Roy Turk, b. 1892Alojzij Turk, b. 1909Stella Turk, b. 1925Godwin Turk, b. 1950Elizabeth Turk, b. 1961John Turk, b. 1962Željko Turk, b. 1962Gavin Turk, b. 1967Matt Turk, b. 1968Martin Turk, b. 2003

The ten people covered by the most Wikipedia language editions — a proxy for cross-cultural notability, which favours historical and Western figures over equally prominent contemporary ones — shown by birth year. Source: Wikidata (CC0).

Evidence●

Attested in 37 sources across 21 countries.

Official registers attesting Turk
CountryRegisterYearCountRank
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010201010K#3,450
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000200010K#3,277
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 202020209.8K#3,537
SI Sloveniastat.si Imena rojstva — full name register (per-token frequency + rank)—3.2K#13
HR CroatiaDZS — Imena i prezimena (per-token lookup form)20211.8K#238
HR CroatiaDZS — Učestalost prezimena (Popis 2021)20211.5K—
IN IndiaInstate — India surnames (clean spellings) from electoral rolls—1.2K#4,874
NL NetherlandsCBG Familienamenbank — Dutch surname bearer counts (GBA/BRP 2007)20071.1K#1,558
US United StatesCensus Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex2020169#40,711
BR BrazilIBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname)—156#44,888
AR ArgentinaRENAPER — Apellidos (person counts, national)—155—
FR FranceINSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000)1991142—

Reference works 5

  • The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
  • Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
  • Wikipedia given-name tokens
  • Wikipedia surname tokens
  • Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)

These works list the name; their figures are licensed and are not reproduced here.

Register rows as of the 2026-09-12 data build · 58 rows in the corpus for this spelling.

Frequently asked questions

How common is the name Turk?
We estimate roughly 19 thousand people bear Turk (counting its spellings and scripts) across 13 countries in our records.
In which country does Turk have the most bearers?
Turk is most frequently recorded in Germany, where it is most often spelled türk.
How common is Turk compared with other names?
In Germany, Turk is the 917th most common surname of 734,811 surnames recorded there.
What does the name Turk mean?
Recorded meaning: (i) medieval nickname for someone thought to resemble a Turk; (ii) from the medieval personal name Turk; (iii) shortened form of McTurk; (iv) Jewish surname denoting a Jew from Turkey or the Ottoman E…
Query this name via API
curl https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/turk

The same payload this page is built from: spellings and scripts, countries and languages, related names, and the registers that attest the form. Rate-limited for casual use. Bulk access and licensing.

About this data

● measured from records◐ inferred from the name graph○ machine-generated

Data snapshot . Figures are rebuilt periodically and will change.

Statistics are aggregated from the Mondonomo name corpus; related names and etymology are inferred from the name graph; pronunciation and any machine-marked transliterations are model-generated. Read how the numbers are made, including their known failure modes, and where the data comes from.

Reference works we consult — surname dictionaries, official name registers, Wikidata and Wiktionary — are named directly, beside the claims they support. The per-country source counts also include datasets of person records: we publish how many there are and their authority tier, but not their names.

Cite this page Mondonomo, “Turk” — the 917th most common surname in Germany. Data snapshot 2026-09-12.

See how Turk parses inside a full name →