Verbs and Nouns from Adjectives | Turkish Grammar

English needs different verbs for "to clean," "to get clean," and "to make something dirty" — the relationship to the adjective "clean / dirty" is buried. Turkish wears it on the surface. From a single adjective or noun, three live suffixes spin off three different verbs, each with a predictable meaning: -lA makes a transitive "do / apply X to something," -lAş makes an intransitive "become X," and -lAn makes "acquire X / become equipped with X." Learn this trio and you can both decode and produce hundreds of verbs from adjectives and nouns you already know. A fourth, narrower suffix — the inchoative -Al / -l — gives a handful of irregular "become X" verbs from short adjectives.

-lA: "do / apply / make use of X" (transitive)

The suffix -lA (harmony shapes -la / -le) turns an adjective or noun into a transitive verb meaning roughly "act on something with respect to X." The exact reading depends on the base, but the verb almost always takes an object.

temiz "clean" → temizlemek "to clean (something)"
hazır "ready" → hazırlamak "to prepare (something)"
baş "head, start" → başlamak "to start"
taş "stone" → taşlamak "to stone (someone); to grind down"
kilit "lock" → kilitlemek "to lock"

Misafir gelmeden önce salonu güzelce temizledim.

I cleaned the living room nicely before the guests arrived.

Sunumu akşama kadar hazırlamam gerekiyor.

I need to prepare the presentation by this evening.

Çıkarken kapıyı kilitlemeyi unutma.

Don't forget to lock the door on your way out.

Because -lA verbs are transitive, they expect an accusative object when the object is specific: salonu temizledim "I cleaned the living room." This is the workhorse suffix for "do X to something," and it is highly productive — Turkish coins new -lA verbs freely (tıklamak "to click," from the onomatopoeic tık).

-lAş: "become X" (intransitive, often gradual or mutual)

The suffix -lAş (shapes -laş / -leş) makes an intransitive verb meaning "become X" or "turn into X." Crucially, -lAş is built from -lA plus the reciprocal/cooperative voice suffix -Iş (see the reciprocal -ış), and that history leaves a flavor: -lAş verbs often describe a change that is gradual, mutual, or arrived at together.

güzel "beautiful" → güzelleşmek "to become beautiful, grow prettier"
sert "hard, harsh" → sertleşmek "to harden, get tougher"
iyi "good, well" → iyileşmek "to recover, get well"
uzak "far" → uzaklaşmak "to move away, grow distant"
modern → modernleşmek "to modernize (intransitive), become modern"

Ameliyattan sonra günden güne iyileşti.

After the operation she got better day by day.

Hava soğudukça tartışmanın tonu da sertleşti.

As the weather grew cold the tone of the argument hardened too.

Gemi limandan yavaşça uzaklaştı.

The ship slowly drew away from the harbor.

The reciprocal undertone is why -lAş so naturally fits collective, society-wide change: kentleşmek "to urbanize," yabancılaşmak "to become alienated." Many become a mutual or shared process, not a single private event. Contrast güzelleşmek "to grow more beautiful" (a change that comes over you) with the transitive güzelleştirmek "to beautify, make beautiful" — adding the causative -tir flips "become X" back to "make become X."

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The pair -lAş "become X" and -lAştır "make become X" is a goldmine. From any adjective you can build the intransitive change (sertleşmek "harden") and its causative partner (sertleştirmek "to harden something"). English juggles separate verbs — "harden" can be either — but Turkish keeps the two meanings visibly distinct.

-lAn: "acquire X / become equipped with X" (intransitive)

The suffix -lAn (shapes -lan / -len) makes an intransitive verb meaning "come to have X, take on X, get furnished with X." Historically it is -lA plus the passive/reflexive -n, and the meaning is reflexive-ish: the subject ends up possessing or affected by X.

hasta "sick" → hastalanmak "to fall ill, get sick"
ev "house, home" → evlenmek "to get married" (literally "to become housed/homed")
yaş "age" → yaşlanmak "to grow old"
sinir "nerve" → sinirlenmek "to get angry, get on edge"
şeref "honor" → şereflenmek "to be honored (by a visit)"

Çocuk okulda hastalandı, gidip almam gerekti.

The child got sick at school, I had to go pick him up.

Geçen yaz üniversite arkadaşıyla evlendiler.

Last summer they got married to her university friend.

Trafikte boşuna sinirlenme, elinden bir şey gelmez.

Don't get worked up over the traffic for nothing, there's nothing you can do.

The "acquire / become equipped with" reading is sharpest with concrete nouns: para "money" → paralanmak (though that has drifted to "to be torn apart"); cleaner cases are ışıklanmak "to become lit," donanmak "to get equipped." With state nouns and adjectives, -lAn shades into "fall into the state of X": hastalanmak, yaşlanmak, sinirlenmek.

The three-way contrast in one frame

Put the three suffixes on a single base and the division of labor is crystal clear:

Suffix	Meaning	Transitivity	Example
-lA	do / apply X to something	transitive	temizlemek "to clean (sth)"
-lAş	become X (often gradual/mutual)	intransitive	güzelleşmek "to grow beautiful"
-lAn	acquire X / fall into state X	intransitive	hastalanmak "to fall ill"

From hasta "sick" you can see all three logics at work across the language: there is no common hastalamak, but hastalanmak "to fall ill" (acquire the state) is everyday, and the causative hastalandırmak "to make sick" supplies the transitive sense. From güzel "beautiful": güzelleşmek "become beautiful," güzelleştirmek "make beautiful." From temiz "clean": temizlemek "to clean," temizlenmek "to get oneself clean / be cleaned." The grammar gives you a small kit of suffixes and you assemble exactly the verb you mean.

-Al / -l: the inchoative "become X" from short adjectives

A small, closed set of common adjectives forms its "become X" verb not with -lAş but with the inchoative suffix -Al / -l (shapes -al / -el, or bare -l after a vowel). These are irregular and must be memorized, but they are high-frequency.

kısa "short" → kısalmak "to grow shorter, shorten (intransitive)"
çok "many, much" → çoğalmak "to multiply, increase" (note k → ğ before the vowel)
dar "narrow" → daralmak "to narrow, get tight"
az "few, little" → azalmak "to diminish, dwindle"
düz "flat, straight" → düzelmek "to straighten out, improve"

Günler kısaldı, artık akşam beşte hava kararıyor.

The days have grown shorter; now it gets dark at five in the evening.

Şehirdeki nüfus son on yılda hızla çoğaldı.

The population in the city has grown rapidly in the last ten years.

Pantolon yıkamada daraldı, artık zor giyiyorum.

The trousers shrank in the wash, I can barely fit into them now.

Like -lAş, these are intransitive "become X" verbs, and each has a causative partner in -Alt / -lt: kısaltmak "to shorten (something)," çoğaltmak "to multiply (something)," düzeltmek "to correct, fix." You cannot predict which adjectives take -Al / -l and which take -lAş; treat this set as a short list to learn.

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When you don't know whether an adjective uses -lAş or -Al for "become X," default to -lAş — it is the productive option and is understood for almost any adjective (genişleşmek is rare but parseable). The -Al verbs are a fixed handful; if a word isn't on that short list, -lAş is your safe bet.

How this differs from English

English mostly relies on separate, unrelated verbs and on the catch-all "get / become + adjective": clean → to clean / to get clean, sick → to fall ill / to make sick. The adjective-to-verb link is sometimes there (to widen, to harden) but inconsistent and often ambiguous between transitive and intransitive — "the gap widened" vs. "we widened the gap" use the same verb. Turkish refuses that ambiguity: -lA/-lAş/-lAn (plus their causatives) assign one form to each meaning. The cost is more suffixes to learn; the reward is that transitivity and the "do vs. become vs. acquire" distinction are never left to context. For an English speaker, the skill to build is seeing the adjective root — recognizing that güzelleşmek, sertleşmek, iyileşmek all share the -lAş "become" template — rather than memorizing each as an isolated verb.

Common mistakes

❌ Çok güzelledi.

Wrong suffix for 'became beautiful' — -lA is transitive 'do X'. Use -lAş for 'become X': güzelleşti.

✅ Çok güzelleşti.

She became much more beautiful.

❌ Çocuk okulda hastalaştı.

-lAş 'become' clashes with the 'fall into a state' sense here; the established verb is hastalanmak.

✅ Çocuk okulda hastalandı.

The child fell ill at school.

❌ Pantolonu kısaldım.

kısalmak is intransitive 'get shorter'; to shorten something use the causative kısaltmak.

✅ Pantolonu kısalttım.

I shortened the trousers.

❌ Salon temizleşti.

Wrong logic — temizleşmek is unusual; for 'I cleaned the room' use transitive temizlemek.

✅ Salonu temizledim.

I cleaned the living room.

❌ Geçen yaz evlendiler bir evde.

Mis-segmentation — evlenmek already means 'get married', not 'move into a house'; the 'house' is etymological, not literal.

✅ Geçen yaz evlendiler.

They got married last summer.

The thread running through these errors is not seeing the adjective/noun root and its voice-flavored derivation: choosing -lA when you mean "become," forgetting that -lAş and -Al are intransitive and need a causative to take an object, or reading a frozen -lAn verb (evlenmek) too literally.

Key takeaways

-lA (temizlemek, hazırlamak) = transitive "do / apply X" — takes an object.
-lAş (güzelleşmek, sertleşmek, iyileşmek) = intransitive "become X," with a gradual/mutual flavor from its hidden reciprocal -Iş; causative partner -lAştır.
-lAn (hastalanmak, evlenmek, yaşlanmak, sinirlenmek) = intransitive "acquire X / fall into state X," from -lA + -n.
-Al / -l (kısalmak, çoğalmak, azalmak, düzelmek) = a closed set of irregular inchoatives "become X" from short adjectives; causative in -Alt / -lt.
The English split among unrelated verbs and the ambiguous "get/become + adjective" is replaced by one Turkish form per meaning — your job is to spot the shared root. See deverbal nouns for the reverse direction, the reciprocal -ış for the voice inside -lAş, and compounds with etmek / olmak for the analytic alternative to these suffixes.

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