Source — Wiktionary, "مراق" (Ottoman Turkish "merak")
- Title: مراق
- Author: Wiktionary contributors (unauthored, collectively edited)
- Publication: en.wiktionary.org
- URL: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/مراق
- Date: undated (live entry; last edited 6 July 2026 per the page's own footer at access time)
- Accessed: 2026-09-02
- Type: tertiary — neutral/lexicographic
- Access method note: fetched and read directly from raw HTML (
curlwith a browser User-Agent, then a tag-strip).
Extract
- Ottoman Turkish noun مراق (merak): "curiosity"; "whim, caprice"; "fancy, passion, engrossing occupation"; "monomania"; "fear or anxiety."
- Etymology: the entry itself flags its own etymology as "missing or incomplete" beyond a bare comparison to Azerbaijani maraq and Uzbek maroq — it does not independently corroborate the popular claim (repeated by web-search synthesis and several popular sources) that the word traces to an Arabic root. This project treats the Arabic-derivation claim as sourced only to the OddFeed article's citation of Sevan Nişanyan's Etymological Dictionary of Contemporary Turkish (see
oddfeed-jovanoski-2023-meraki.md), not independently confirmed here or against Nişanyan's dictionary directly (that dictionary's own site is a JavaScript-rendered single-page application this project's tools could not extract text from — see Gaps). - Descendants — a genuine areal Balkan/Caucasus loanword family, listed by Wiktionary as descending from this single Ottoman Turkish word: Turkish merak; and, via Turkish, Albanian merak, Armenian մէռաք/մեռաք/մէրաք/մերաք/մերախ, Georgian მერაყი (Adjara dialect), Ladino merekia, Greek μεράκι (meráki), Laz მერაღი, Macedonian мерак, Serbo-Croatian mèrāk, Bulgarian мерак. This is the first time this project has documented a "celebrated untranslatable word" as one member of a wider, well-attested cross-linguistic loanword family rather than an isolated case — a materially different shape of evidence than the popular "uniquely Greek" framing assumes (see Gaps in the word page for how this compares to lagom's thinly sourced, unconfirmed "Comparable terms" list).
- Two references are named for the Ottoman Turkish entry: Kélékian, Diran (1911), Dictionnaire turc-français, Constantinople: Mihran, p. 1144; Redhouse, James W. (1890), A Turkish and English Lexicon, Constantinople: A. H. Boyajian, p. 1799 — both named but not directly read by this project.
Gaps
- The claim that Ottoman Turkish merak itself derives from an Arabic root is not corroborated on this page — Wiktionary flags its own Ottoman Turkish etymology as incomplete. This project's only source for a specific Arabic root (مرقّ/مراقّ maraḳḳ, "the sensitive part of the stomach, the spleen") is the OddFeed article's secondhand citation of Nişanyan's dictionary — itself not independently read (see that source's own Gaps).
- Kélékian (1911) and Redhouse (1890), the two primary lexicographic references named here, have not been directly read by this project.