Turk
surname · Latin script
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
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 23 countries · latest register: DZS, 2021
Turk is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country. In Dominica it is the most common surname.
- DMDominica≈1 in 11(inferred from the name graph)
- SISlovenia1 in 652
- HRCroatia1 in 2.4K
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- United States (measured from records)
- Record sources
- 394 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 11 (inferred from the name graph)
10,354 people, 2010
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
Dominica, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts
(measured from records)Spellings marked ● are how people bearing the name write it in our records, and ○ marks a model's transliteration; click a spelling to open its page.
Meaning & origin
(measured from records)(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.
Cited for this meaning 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Attested across 20 languages in the etymology graph.
Where the surname Turk is found
(measured from records)Turk counted together with the spellings and other-language forms grouped with it. Where a register counted another spelling, the row names it.
Sorted by bearers: national registers' counts, and Mondonomo's estimates (≈, est.) where no register counts.
| Country | Most common spelling | Sources | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | — | 10,354 | 1 in 32K | 10K | Turk | 394 |
| DM Dominica | #1 | ≈6,000 est. | ≈1 in 11 | — | Turk | 1 |
| SI Slovenia | — | 3,227 | 1 in 652 | 3.2K | — | 39 |
| EG Egypt | — | ≈2,200 est. | ≈1 in 54K | — | Turk | 40 |
| SY Syria | — | ≈2,000 est. | ≈1 in 12K | — | Turk | 14 |
| JO Jordan | — | ≈2,000 est. | ≈1 in 5.8K | — | Turk | 24 |
| HR Croatia | — | 1,765 | 1 in 2.4K | 1.8K | — | — |
| LB Lebanon | — | ≈630 est. | ≈1 in 9.2K | — | Turk | 27 |
10,354 people counted by Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010, 2010. Exact figures are national registers' own counts, while figures marked ≈ and est. are Mondonomo’s estimates, counted from our sources and calibrated against those registers; hover one for how far to trust it in that country. A dash means neither exists.
Registers cited: Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010; stat.si Imena rojstva — full name register (per-token frequency + rank); DZS — Imena i prezimena (per-token lookup form). Figures without a register are Mondonomo estimates; see Methodology.
Country figures for a list of names, at full precision, are available under licence rather than by scraping this table (how that works).
Other recorded senses
(measured from records)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.
Notable people with this name
(measured from records)- Roy Turkb. 1892USAmerican songwriter and lyricist (1892-1934)
- John Turkb. 1962USAmerican police officer, actor and personal trainer
- Martin Turkb. 2003SISlovenian association football player
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).
How to address them
(machine-generated)Evidence
(measured from records)41 registers and reference works attest this spelling, across 23 countries.
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Turk mean, and where does it come from?
- (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… Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- Which countries have the most people with the surname Turk?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 10 thousand people named Turk, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled turk. After it come Dominica, Slovenia, Egypt and Syria; the country table on this page ranks them.
- How common is the name Turk?
- In the United States, the national register counted 10,354 people named Turk in 2010, about 1 in 32 thousand residents.
- How common is Turk compared with other names?
- In Dominica, Turk is the most common surname of 841 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Turk?
Nobody replies to these one by one, but what readers ask decides what these pages answer next.
Query this name via API
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/turkThe payload this page is built from: spellings and scripts, countries and languages, related names, and the registers that attest the form. It takes a free API key (1,000 requests a day), which returns what this page shows everyone; the full country table, every register citation and the year-by-year series come with a licensed key, as does bulk access.
About this data
measured from records inferred from the name graph machine-generated
These figures come from the data snapshot of and will change as it is rebuilt.
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 most common surname in Dominica. Data snapshot 2026-10-13.