The Word Tulip May Have Grown Out of a Turban

Picture a spring garden in full bloom, row after row of tulips standing to attention, each one a neat, rounded cup of red, yellow or pink. Now picture a cloth turban, wound snugly and sitting high on a head. Squint a little and the two shapes start to look alike. For centuries, that likeness has been the standard explanation of the flower's name.

Tulip in English, tulipán in Spanish and tyulpan in Russian are one word. Dictionary.com dates the English word to 1570 to 1580 and traces it through an earlier New Latin form, tulipa, to the Italian tulipano, and from there to the Turkish tülbent, a turban, because of a fancied likeness. The etymological dictionary of Shansky gives Russian the same road, with one more stop: the word arrived in the eighteenth century from French, which had it from Italian, which had it from the Turkish tülbend, from the Persian dulbend, a turban. Literally, it says, a tulip is a turban flower.

How the word travelled with the bulbs

The word moved because the flower did. Ornamental tulips came to Europe from the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century, and a 2022 study in the journal Scientific Reports pieced together how. A watercolour titled Tulipa Turcica, by Johannes Kentmann, is dated 1549. In 1559 the Swiss naturalist Conrad Gessner saw a single red tulip growing in a garden in Augsburg and two years later published the first description of one, with a woodcut.

1. 1549 A watercolour titled Tulipa Turcica is painted
2. 1554 An ambassador on the road to Istanbul is said to meet the flower
3. 1559 A single red tulip is seen in a garden in Augsburg
4. 1570–1580 The word tulip enters English

What people often get wrong

The tidy version says that Turkish speakers called the flower a turban and Europe simply copied them. The evidence is less tidy. The usual star of the story is Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, the Habsburg ambassador at the Ottoman court from 1554 to 1562, who wrote in his famous Turkish letters that he met a flower the Turks called tulipan. But the same study points out that those letters were written between 1581 and 1589, long after the journey, and some modern authors argue that the name came from a misunderstanding. The researchers call that idea plausible, but they could not find it in any sixteenth-century writing.

So the sources agree on the road the word took, from Persian through Turkish into Italian and on across Europe, and on the turban at the start of it. What remains uncertain is whether the flower was named for the turban by the people who grew it, or by visitors who were struck by the likeness and mixed up two words.

Why the name stuck

Whatever happened in that first conversation, the comparison is easy to see. A tulip that has not fully opened has smooth petals folded round each other in a closed, rounded dome, much like cloth wound round and round. Europeans who had never seen either thing before met them together, from the same lands, and the name fitted.

Next time you buy a bunch of tulips, give the closed buds a second look. You are holding a little bouquet of turbans, or at least a very old and very charming case of mistaken words.