I have tallied and analyzed the first and last names of about 50 million Turkish citizens. Here I present the results of aggregated data. To protect their privacy, the complete data is not made available.
The data contains records of 49,611,709 individuals, 24,534,483 men and 25,077,226 women, born between 1888 and 1991.
All strings are in capital letters. Non-ASCII Turkish characters are converted to ASCII (Ü->U, Ö->O, İ->I, Ş->S, Ğ->G, Ç->C).
The raw data was given in plain text form. I have used simple Python scripts to extract relevant data and to tally counts. I have also used command-line tools such as awk, grep, wc for quick filtering and counting.
This page shows only the top 20 entries in the lists. For complete lists, see the file turkishnames.zip in this repository. The lists are given in descending order by count, so you can see the rank of a name by looking at its position in the file.
In parsing the names, I have counted the first and middle names separately. For example, a man named Mehmet Ali is counted under MEHMET as well as ALI.
The 20 most common male names (see file male_name_tally for a complete list).
| First name | Count |
|---|---|
| MEHMET | 1681870 |
| ALI | 1026732 |
| MUSTAFA | 991402 |
| AHMET | 832581 |
| HUSEYIN | 599081 |
| HASAN | 575189 |
| IBRAHIM | 500358 |
| MURAT | 440120 |
| ISMAIL | 417622 |
| OSMAN | 340200 |
| HALIL | 288916 |
| RAMAZAN | 286392 |
| OMER | 279963 |
| YUSUF | 252189 |
| SULEYMAN | 214209 |
| ABDULLAH | 202199 |
| KEMAL | 181997 |
| FATIH | 180101 |
| MAHMUT | 168177 |
| RECEP | 164173 |
The 20 most common female names (see file female_name_tally for a complete list).
| First name | Count |
|---|---|
| FATMA | 1228293 |
| AYSE | 969973 |
| EMINE | 787293 |
| HATICE | 687368 |
| ZEYNEP | 333301 |
| MERYEM | 218986 |
| ELIF | 216261 |
| SULTAN | 179158 |
| HULYA | 171124 |
| SEVIM | 168463 |
| OZLEM | 165682 |
| SERIFE | 164457 |
| FADIME | 160452 |
| HANIFE | 155109 |
| AYSEL | 154638 |
| DILEK | 149858 |
| ZEHRA | 149354 |
| YASEMIN | 148887 |
| HACER | 147168 |
| HAVVA | 145851 |
One can also wonder about the least common names. However, the distribution of names is long-tailed, meaning there are thousands of names very rare names, each carried by only a few people. Furthermore, many names are misspellings or variants of more common names.
The database contains 164,820 distinct first names. However, only 25,940 of them are carried by 10 or more people.
| number of people carrying the name | number of distinct names |
|---|---|
| >= 1 | 164,820 |
| >= 10 | 25,940 |
| >= 100 | 7616 |
| >= 1,000 | 2319 |
| >= 10,000 | 805 |
| >= 100,000 | 70 |
| >= 1,000,000 | 3 |
There are more than a hundred thousand people with a unique first name, so the question of the least common name does not apply.
Female first names have more variation than male first names. Of all first names used by at least 100 people, 4899 are female and 3189 are male.
There are many Turkish names that are used by either gender, such as Deniz, Kamuran, Tuna, etc. However, when I tried to tally the names that occur both in male and female list, I was surprised to see that exclusively male and female names also appeared on the list. For example, there are 69 Mehmets listed as female (out of 1.7 million) and 48 Fatmas listed as male (out of 1.2 million). These are obviously clerical mistakes. In order to eliminate them, I discounted the names where one gender's count is less than 1/20th of the other.
Here are the most common 20 unisex names (see the file unisex_name_tally_filtered for a complete list).
| Name | Males | Females | Total count |
|---|---|---|---|
| YASAR | 161295 | 20662 | 181957 |
| AYHAN | 99641 | 12362 | 112003 |
| YUKSEL | 56679 | 44158 | 100837 |
| ISMET | 79623 | 11568 | 91191 |
| DURSUN | 74131 | 15564 | 89695 |
| MUZAFFER | 75073 | 7317 | 82390 |
| UMIT | 72587 | 6411 | 78998 |
| DENIZ | 32900 | 43779 | 76679 |
| HIKMET | 53208 | 20450 | 73658 |
| OZGUR | 61928 | 5121 | 67049 |
| ILHAN | 60225 | 3717 | 63942 |
| FIKRET | 49488 | 3325 | 52813 |
| OZCAN | 47837 | 3733 | 51570 |
| NIMET | 4029 | 46739 | 50768 |
| SATI | 3767 | 44062 | 47829 |
| CIHAN | 40260 | 6288 | 46548 |
| SUAT | 41030 | 2604 | 43634 |
| SERVET | 30728 | 10998 | 41726 |
| SERIF | 35247 | 5892 | 41139 |
| NUR | 3286 | 35213 | 38499 |
The names above are sorted according to their overall count. However, many of them are biased toward being male names (more men than women with this name). Alternatively, one can sort the names according to some "equality score", which I define as 1 - |males - females|/total. So if a name is carried by an equal number of people in each gender its score is 1. If there is a strong bias for one gender, its score is close to 0.
Here are the first 20 unisex names sorted according to the equality score. We count only names that are carried by more than 10,000 people. (See the file unisex_names_equality_score for a complete list.)
| Name | Male | Female | Total | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| EMIR | 8662 | 8309 | 16971 | 0.9792 |
| MUHTEREM | 5027 | 5568 | 10595 | 0.948938 |
| KAMURAN | 7255 | 5739 | 12994 | 0.883331 |
| YUKSEL | 56679 | 44158 | 100837 | 0.875829 |
| DENIZ | 32900 | 43779 | 76679 | 0.858123 |
| OMUR | 8198 | 6159 | 14357 | 0.857979 |
| SIRIN | 11878 | 15828 | 27706 | 0.857432 |
| FERHAN | 4128 | 5934 | 10062 | 0.820513 |
| ERGUL | 4737 | 7036 | 11773 | 0.804723 |
| SENEL | 6043 | 9012 | 15055 | 0.80279 |
| HIDAYET | 17361 | 10769 | 28130 | 0.765659 |
| GUNGOR | 10690 | 6559 | 17249 | 0.760508 |
| OLCAY | 11721 | 6038 | 17759 | 0.679993 |
| DURDU | 8449 | 16604 | 25053 | 0.67449 |
| SAFAK | 7392 | 3751 | 11143 | 0.673248 |
| ILKAY | 6526 | 13337 | 19863 | 0.657101 |
| SEZER | 8624 | 4000 | 12624 | 0.633714 |
| GUNAY | 8221 | 18257 | 26478 | 0.620968 |
| HIKMET | 53208 | 20450 | 73658 | 0.555269 |
Just as in first names, I have counted double last names separately. The most common 20 last names are as follows (see the file lastname_tally.csv for a complete list).
| Last Name | Count |
|---|---|
| YILMAZ | 712772 |
| KAYA | 490839 |
| DEMIR | 463847 |
| SAHIN | 406697 |
| CELIK | 400976 |
| YILDIZ | 391630 |
| YILDIRIM | 387084 |
| OZTURK | 361303 |
| AYDIN | 358847 |
| OZDEMIR | 331830 |
| ARSLAN | 295082 |
| DOGAN | 281281 |
| KILIC | 247886 |
| CETIN | 208683 |
| ASLAN | 208155 |
| KARA | 170395 |
| KOC | 167971 |
| KURT | 161857 |
| OZKAN | 157206 |
| ACAR | 149566 |
There are 189,094 distinct last names, including misspellings and inconsistently entered double last names (e.g., using hyphens or parentheses). Here is a distribution of the number of last names:
| number of people | number of distinct last names |
|---|---|
| >= 1 | 189,094 |
| >= 10 | 114,918 |
| >= 100 | 28,606 |
| >= 1,000 | 4,941 |
| >= 10,000 | 721 |
| >= 100,000 | 48 |
| >= 1,000,000 | 0 |
An interesting observation is that there are more last names than first names, even accounting for misspellings. For example, there are about 115,000 unique last names, carried by 10 or more people, compared to 26,000 such first names.
As an interesting aside, I counted people who had the same first and last names. Turns out there are several thousand such people, and more than 1500 such combinations. Here is the top 22 (see the file same_first_last_tally for a complete list).
| First name | Last name | Count |
|---|---|---|
| YILMAZ | YILMAZ | 499 |
| YILDIZ | YILDIZ | 479 |
| AYDIN | AYDIN | 303 |
| SAHIN | SAHIN | 299 |
| DOGAN | DOGAN | 185 |
| BAYRAM | BAYRAM | 172 |
| GULER | GULER | 171 |
| YASAR | YASAR | 161 |
| ARSLAN | ARSLAN | 153 |
| DURSUN | DURSUN | 106 |
| DURMUS | DURMUS | 98 |
| YUKSEL | YUKSEL | 94 |
| SEVIM | SEVIM | 90 |
| KAYA | KAYA | 87 |
| CETIN | CETIN | 78 |
| ASLAN | ASLAN | 73 |
| TURAN | TURAN | 70 |
| YALCIN | YALCIN | 69 |
| OZCAN | OZCAN | 68 |
| BEKTAS | BEKTAS | 59 |
| OZKAN | OZKAN | 59 |
| DURAN | DURAN | 58 |
This time I went up to 22, because as a kid of 80s I just had to include "Duran Duran" on the list.