Source — Nick Nicholas, "What do the Turkish loanwords merak and meraklı mean in your language?" (Ἡλληνιστεύκοντος blog, mirroring a Quora answer)
- Title: What do the Turkish loanwords merak and meraklı mean in your language?
- Author: Nick Nicholas (a Greek linguist; his blog's subtitle is "Set Union of Greek and Linguistics")
- Publication: Ἡλληνιστεύκοντος (hellenisteukontos.opoudjis.net), mirroring the author's own original 2016-08-09 Quora answer
- Date: 2016-08-09 (per the post's own dateline; the blog mirror carries the same date)
- URL: http://hellenisteukontos.opoudjis.net/2016-08-09-what-do-the-turkish-loanwords-merak-and-meraklı-mean-in-your-language/
- Type: secondary — a specialist's informed personal answer, not peer-reviewed, but citing and directly translating the primary Triantafyllidis dictionary entry
- Accessed: 2026-09-02
- Access method note: fetched directly via the author's own blog mirror rather than the original Quora URL, sidestepping this project's standing Quora/sign-in-wall risk (parallel to the Goodreads fence) without needing it — the blog copy was openly reachable via plain
curl.
Extract
- Nicholas gives his own short list of Greek senses first, independent of any dictionary quotation: μεράκι means "yearning," "love-sickness," "pride in one's work" (in the set phrase με μεράκι, "with merak"). A μερακλής is "a bon vivant, a connoisseur, someone who knows how to have a good time and who appreciates the finer things in life." The verb μερακλώνομαι is "to be in a euphoric mood, usually associated with drinking."
- He then explicitly quotes and translates the Triantafyllidis dictionary's three senses for meraki, meraklis, and meraklono — his translation converges closely, sense for sense and even example for example, with this project's own independent direct translation of the same primary entry (see
greek-language-gr-triantafyllidis-meraki.md): "intense desire," "intense love and care for something, especially an activity," and "(plural) intense pleasant sensation that comes from entertainment." - Links to Sevan Nişanyan's Turkish etymological dictionary (
nisanyansozluk.com) for the word's ultimate origin, but does not himself quote or summarize its content in this post — this project attempted to follow the same link directly and could not extract readable content (see Gaps). - Ends the post noting he is the original-question's asker on Quora and intends to "formulate a grand unified theory of how the meanings grew" once other answers arrive — this project did not find or search for a specific follow-up post doing so.
Gaps
nisanyansozluk.comrenders its dictionary entries via client-side JavaScript; this project'scurl-based fetch retrieved only the page shell, no entry text. The specific Arabic-root etymology this project has on file (viaoddfeed-jovanoski-2023-meraki.md's citation of the same Nişanyan dictionary) is therefore still only secondhand, not independently confirmed against Nişanyan's own dictionary text.- No indication in this post of whether Nicholas ever wrote the promised "grand unified theory" follow-up.