Ay-

In Turkish a lovely face is called ay yüzlü ‘moon-faced’. The Güncel Türkçe Sözlük explains the idiom ay gibi ‘like the moon’ as ‘very beautiful’. That figurative sense is the key to surnames that begin with Ay-. The word ay names the moon, and it also names what is beautiful and bright.

The word has one syllable and stands on its own. As the first element of a compound it keeps the same shape whatever follows. It joins a back-vowel element in Ayhan and a front-vowel element in Aygün. Endings added later look only at the vowel of the last element: Ayhan’ın, Aygün’ün.

The element qualifies the second element, which carries the main meaning. Ayhan is ‘moon khan’, a ruler as radiant as the moon. In Aytekin the second element is the Old Turkic title tekin ‘prince’. Aytaç reads as ‘moon crown’ and Aykut as ‘fortunate as the moon’. Aydemir is ‘moon iron’. Aygün puts two heavenly bodies side by side, ay ‘moon’ and gün ‘sun, day’. Ayyıldız follows the same path and means ‘moon and star’.

Aydoğan is less straightforward. Doğan may be the bird of prey, which would make the name a ‘moon falcon’. It may also be the participle ‘born, rising’, which gives ‘rising moon’. The second reading is offered more often for this name, but without a source that settles it, this is only a tendency.

The biggest trap is Aydın. In TÜİK ADNKS 2025 it ranks ninth with 581,387 bearers, yet it is not an Ay- compound. It is a dictionary word in its own right, meaning ‘bright, lit’ and ‘educated, intellectual’. Ayan comes from Arabic a‘yân ‘notables’. Ayaz is the ‘dry cold of a clear night’, and Ayık means ‘sober’. Ayvaz was the term for a servant in large households. Ayşe is a personal name of Arabic origin. Aynalı and Ayrancı are built from ayna ‘mirror’ and ayran ‘yoghurt drink’ with suffixes. Aynur, Aysel and Ayten are women’s names with a compound structure; as surnames they are treated as names.

The same word also appears at the end of surnames; Alpay and Tuncay are covered on the -ay page.