Weapons and arms

You could build an armoury out of words alone: a kılıç ‘sword’ on the wall, a kalkan ‘shield’ beside it, a mızrak ‘spear’ in the corner, a tolga ‘helmet’ on the shelf. Every one of these words is a surname today. This hub gathers surnames from weapons, armour and war emblems: sword, arrow, bow, shield, spear, lance, bayonet, mace, horsetail standard, banner and flag.

The words and where they come from

Kılıç is Old Turkic and has kept its meaning unchanged. With 450,572 bearers, Kılıç is the 13th most common surname in Türkiye (TÜİK ADNKS 2025). It is by far the largest member of the group. The word also appears in historical names: Kılıçarslan, borne by Seljuk sultans, joins ‘sword’ and ‘lion’. Dictionaries give kılınç as an older form of the word, and Kılınç is a surname as well.

Kalkan is a Turkish word for a shield used in defence. TDK also lists the same form as the name of a fish, the turbot; for the surname the usual reading is the weapon.

Mızrak comes from Arabic mizrāq, which meant a short spear or javelin. In Turkish it became the general word for a long-shafted weapon with an iron point. It is one of the few members of this group that is not Turkic.

Kargı means ‘lance, spear’ in Turkish; the same word is also the name of a long, hard reed.

Süngü now means the bayonet fixed to a rifle. In Old Turkic the word meant ‘spear’; when the weapon changed, the name moved on to the new one.

Tolga is Old Turkic for ‘helmet’. Today it is better known as a man's given name, but the word itself names a piece of head armour.

Topuz is a war club with a heavy round head, a word of Turkic origin.

Sancak and bayrak are emblems of war. Besides ‘banner’, sancak was also the name of an administrative district in the Ottoman state. Both words are Turkic.

Form

Weapon names are often used bare. In compounds the head comes last: Karakılıç is a kind of kılıç, with the colour word in front. Akkılıç ‘white sword’ is built the same way. Forms with -oğlu exist too, such as Kılıçoğlu. Words with -cı/-ci for the person who makes or uses a weapon go to other hubs. The maker belongs with the crafts, the soldier with the ranks.

The 1934 setting

Article 3 of the Surname Law banned the names of ranks and offices, tribes, and foreign races and nations. Weapons were not on that list. Article 5 of the Surname Regulation took as its principle that new surnames come from the Turkish language, and kılıç, kalkan, kargı and süngü fitted it naturally. It would be wrong to conclude that a family who chose a weapon word had anything to do with arms. The word is an image, and the reason behind the choice is usually unknown.

Why it is interesting

This hub shows how concrete Turkish surnames can be. Instead of a title or a quality, people chose an object. That Kılıç sits inside the national top twenty shows how strong one of these objects became as a name.