There are a good many stories about where the name Tokat comes from, and the Ministry of Culture's account settles on none of them. Some studies argue the city was founded by the Togayıt Turks and named after them. Historians such as Ali Cevat and İ. Hakkı Uzunçarşılı held that it comes from tok-kat, the walled city. Another view derives it from tok at, the well-fed horse.
A fourth reading works back from the Byzantine name. Paul Wittek proposed that Tokat was the Byzantine city of Dokeia and tried to prove it with a range of examples, and Sargon Erdem, who wrote a paper on the word, supported him. Erdem argued that the name Dokeia can be read as bowl country — the most fitting name, he wrote, for a place that sits like a real bowl among the mountains ringing it and lives under the constant threat of filling with water, that is of flooding.
