words for "god" and "town" respectively; the name Baghkuy may be compared with Baghdad ("God-given") in which dad is the Old Persian word for "give".

During Soviet rule, the city was spelled in Cyrillic as "????" in Azerbaijani (while the Russian spelling was and still is "????", '). The modern Azerbaijani spelling, which has been using the Latin alphabet since 1991, is Baki; the shift from the Perso-Arabic letter ? (u) to Cyrillic