Kyrgyzstan
/ˌkɪrɡɪˈstɑːn/noun
A country in Central Asia.
Did you know?The -stan in Kyrgyzstan comes from Persian, where it means “place/land,” a suffix shared by many Central and South Asian country names.
Etymological Timeline
Ancient Turkic
Turkic
Kyrgyz
“the name of a Turkic people, possibly meaning “forty tribes” in later tradition, though the deeper origin is uncertain”
Persian
Persian
-stān
“place, land, country”
19th–20th Century
Russian
Киргизия / Kirgiziya
“Russian name for the Kyrgyz people and their territory”
1991
English
Kyrgyzstan
“the modern independent state name adopted after the Soviet period”
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