The Makul English-Turkmen Dictionary, spearheaded by Dr. Dovran Orazgylyjov and published in 2025, is the most comprehensive English-Turkmen dictionary published to date, with 16,500 entries covering everything from everyday conversation to law, medicine, business, and even artificial intelligence. Previous dictionaries in this language pair typically contained around 10,000 words or fewer, so this is a real leap forward.
What drew me in was the mix of old and new. On one page you’ll find myhmansöyerlik (hospitality, literally “guest-loving,” which tells you everything about Turkmen culture), duz-çörek (bread and salt, the traditional welcome), and a whole family of words around düýe (camel) and haly (carpet). A few pages later, you hit dörediji emeli intellekt (generative artificial intelligence) and maşyn öwrenişi (machine learning), terms appearing in a Turkmen dictionary for the first time. I even found a dedicated entry for gawun kaky (dried melon). If you know how seriously Turkmen people take their melons, you’ll understand why it belongs here.
On a personal note, this dictionary has been genuinely useful for my own language study. It’s the kind of book where you look up one word and end up reading ten more entries out of curiosity. The Turkmen translations often reveal something about how the language thinks. Words are more descriptive and more layered than you’d expect, and that makes learning feel less like memorizing and more like discovering.
The dictionary has also been gaining recognition well beyond Turkmenistan. It has been added to the library catalogs at Stanford University, Harvard University, and the New York Public Library, and it is available for purchase on Amazon. A digital and audio version is accessible through the website makulsozluk.com and through mobile apps, where users can hear pronunciations in both English and Turkmen.
Whether you’re studying Turkmen, working in Central Asia, or just curious about the language of a remarkable people that most of the world has yet to discover, this dictionary is well worth your time. And keep an eye out, because Volume II is already in the works. As a teaser, it will include seven sections (Irregular Verbs, Idioms, Phrasal Verbs, Prefixes, Suffixes, Roots, and Contextual Examples), and I’m honored to be on the editorial board. The best is yet to come.
As the Turkmen proverb reminds us: “Dil bilen dünýäni gezersiň,” or “With language, you can travel the world.” In this case, perhaps the Turkmen and English worlds.
– Christopher Wizda
Educator & International Development Professional
Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia 2026