Surnames from nicknames

When two men named Mehmet lived in the same village, the neighbours usually told them apart with a nickname. One might be known by his father's name, the other by a habit or a feature: Deli Mehmet, Köse Mehmet. Such names were not official, but everyone knew who was meant. When the Surname Law arrived, some families registered these settled nicknames, or -oğlu forms built on them, as their surnames.

How a nickname became a surname

Article 1 of Law No. 2525 required every Turk to carry a surname, and Article 7 allowed two years to report it. Article 6 of the Surname Regulation stated that a surname could be used alone or together with “(oğlu)”. That is why nickname surnames live in two forms side by side: bare Topal and Topaloğlu, bare Çolak and Çolakoğlu, bare Köse and Köseoğlu. A third route is the compound. Delibaş joins deli to baş ‘head’.

Article 3 of the same law banned names that offended public decency or were disgusting or ridiculous, and Article 10 of the Regulation added names that were insulting. These were rules about word forms. Nickname words are nonetheless found in today's registers. Much later amendments opened time-limited windows in which surnames contrary to Article 3 could be changed once, by administrative decision, without going to court.

The words

Deli is known today as ‘mad’. In older Turkish and in folk speech, though, the sense ‘reckless, fearless, fiery’ is just as strong; in Ottoman times a light cavalry unit serving on the frontiers was also called deli. The word alone does not tell you which sense a nickname carried.

Topal means ‘lame, limping’. Çolak is an old Turkish word for a person with a disabled arm or hand. According to TÜİK ADNKS 2025, Çolak is the 17th most common surname in Trabzon province (4,877 people).

Köse is a man whose beard grows thin or not at all; the word comes from Persian. According to TÜİK ADNKS 2025, Köse ranks 20th among surnames in Samsun province (5,693 people). Sakallı says the opposite: sakal ‘beard’ plus -lı ‘having’.

Keloğlu adds -oğlu to kel ‘bald’, a word of Persian origin. Keloğlan, the clever hero of Turkish folk tales, carries the same word. Linking the tale and the surname would need evidence; what they share is the word.

How to read these names

Nicknames did not always tell the truth. Sometimes they were jokes, sometimes affectionate, sometimes they said the opposite of what was there. So the surnames on this page should not be read as a trait of any family. Topal or köse in a surname shows only how somebody was once called in some village. It says nothing about the people who carry the name today. That is the interesting part: in the most formal pages of the civil register, the language of the village square lives on.