Karakum
/ˌkærəˈkʊm/noun
A vast desert in Central Asia, chiefly occupying Turkmenistan.
Did you know?The name is Turkic rather than occult: its darkness refers to the desert’s appearance, especially shadowed or vegetation-darkened sand and terrain—not supernatural forces.
Etymological Timeline
Proto-Turkic period
Proto-Turkic
*kara
“Black or dark; the reconstructed ancestor of the Turkic color term.”
Old Turkic
Old Turkic
qara
“Black or dark, a widespread Turkic adjective.”
Old Turkic
Old Turkic
qum
“Sand; the source of the modern Turkic desert term.”
Medieval period
Turkic
Qara Qum
“Black Sand, a descriptive geographical name for the Central Asian desert.”
19th–20th Century
Russian/English
Karakum
“The conventional European and English rendering of the desert’s Turkic name.”
Modern English
English
Karakum
“A major desert region of Central Asia, also called the Karakum Desert.”
Explore more surprising origins