Baby Names

How ParentSide's baby name data is built

ParentSide joins two separate datasets and deliberately keeps them apart: official birth-registration figures published by TÜİK, and a reviewed corpus of meanings and origins. This page explains exactly what each one is, how every collection is calculated, and what the numbers do not mean.

Data source

The popularity data comes from TÜİK's "İstatistiklerle Çocuk, 2025" release, published on 2026-04-20. It gives the 30 most-given names per gender for birth years 2018 to 2025, with a rank and a count for each year.

Publisher: TÜİK
Release: İstatistiklerle Çocuk, 2025
Published: 2026-04-20
Coverage: top 30 names per gender, birth years 2018–2025 (8 years)

The ranks and counts shown on ParentSide were emitted mechanically from that official export; no rank or count is ever retyped by hand. Where newspaper coverage of the same release has reported slightly different totals, ParentSide follows the official export rather than the press report.

This dataset is a list of the 30 most-given names per year, not a complete record of every name used in Türkiye. A name's absence from it does not mean the name is not used.

What "popular" means here

On ParentSide, popularity is the number of babies registered with a name in a particular birth year. It measures how often families chose a name for a newborn.

It is not the total number of living people who carry the name. A name that has been common for decades may be chosen less often for newborns today; the two are different measurements and cannot stand in for each other.

Nor is it search interest or social-media popularity. ParentSide has no data source for those, which is why there is deliberately no "most searched names" collection.

Rank and count

Each name shows two values: its rank in a given year, and the number of babies registered with it that year. Rank 1 means it was the most-given name for its gender that year. The popular names page is based on 2025 and covers 60 names today.

Rising and falling names

A name's movement is calculated by comparing its rank in the earliest year it appears with its rank in the most recently published year (2025). If the position improved, the name is rising; if it slipped, the name is falling. Both lists are ordered by the size of that change.

A name that is not in the latest year is not described as moving in either direction, and appears on neither list. A name whose only appearance is the latest year counts as rising: entering the ranking at all is the largest possible rise.

Every name on the falling list is still among the most-given names in Türkiye. Slipping a few places is not the same as falling out of use.

Established names

A name counts as established when it appears in the official ranking in at least 6 of the 8 published years.

This measures how many years a name appears, not whether it held its position. A name can be both established and falling: present for years, while its rank slipped. Both statements are true of it.

Short names

Names of 4 letters or fewer are selected automatically. Turkish letters count as one character each, so ç, ğ, ı, ö, ş and ü never make a name look longer than it is.

Being short says nothing about how common a name is. This collection does not measure popularity.

Meanings and origins

Meanings and origins do not come from TÜİK. TÜİK publishes only how many babies were given each name; it says nothing about what a name means. That information comes from a separate reviewed corpus.

Most meanings rest on an entry in the Turkish Language Association's dictionary of given names (TDK Kişi Adları Sözlüğü). TDK's text is not reproduced: the meaning is written in ParentSide's own words and a pointer to the verified TDK entry is kept. 662 of the 691 names are recorded this way.

For names TDK does not list there are two cases. For 27 names the meaning was written after review against reputable linguistic and historical sources. For 2 names no single established meaning can responsibly be asserted, and the text says so — that is the finding of the review, not a gap in it.

A meaning is never invented where no recorded source supports one. Nor is a name dropped for lacking one: some names in the official ranking have no TDK entry, and they are shown with their ranking and without a meaning rather than left out.

Origin is the language a name comes from, and is kept separate from meaning. The Turkic-origin collection rests on that recorded origin information, not on how a name is spelled. Linguistic origin and how widely a name is used in Türkiye are different things: many widely used names here are of Arabic or Persian origin.

Coverage

The corpus holds 691 names today: 312 girls' names and 379 boys' names. 60 of them appear in the 2025 official ranking; the rest are names outside the official top 30 whose meanings and origins have been reviewed.

This is a curated corpus. ParentSide does not claim to contain every name used in Türkiye.

Corrections

If you have found an error in a figure, a meaning or an origin, you can write to kvkk@parentside.app. Material errors are corrected when they are identified.

Sources and updates

Sources

TÜİK — İstatistiklerle Çocuk, 2025