Tabipleri

Tabipleri is the Turkish plural possessive form of tabip, a traditional term for a physician. The word tabip itself comes from the Arabic ṭabīb and was widely used in Ottoman Turkish and early Republican Turkish to refer to medical practitioners. Tabipleri, formed by adding the plural suffix -ler and the possessive suffix -i, denotes “the physicians’” or “the physicians” depending on context. In everyday modern Turkish, doktor or hekim is more commonly used for a doctor, while tabip remains a formal or historical term and appears in official language, literature, and historical discussions about medicine.

In historical contexts, tabipler and related phrases appeared in the names of professional bodies and medical institutions. For example, references to physicians’ associations or to the medical profession in the Ottoman and early Republican periods often employ the term tabipler in compound forms. Today, contemporary Turkish medicine is commonly associated with the Turkish Medical Association, Türk Tabipleri Birliği (TTB), which represents physicians across the country and engages in professional standards, ethics, and public health advocacy. The usage of tabipleri to refer to physicians as a group aligns with older linguistic forms and can be encountered in archival texts and formal discourse.

See also: Turkish language, tabip, hekim, doktor, Türk Tabipleri Birliği, medical terminology.