A dragoman (ترجمان) was an interpreter, translator, and official guide between Turkish-, Arabic-, and Persian-speaking countries and polities of the Middle East and European embassies, consulates, vice-consulates and trading posts. A dragoman had to have a knowledge of Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and European languages.

In the Ottoman Empire, dragomans were mainly members of the Ottoman Greek community, who possessed considerable multilingual skills, because Greek trading communities did substantial business in the markets of the Mediterranean Sea, the Black Sea, the Atlantic Ocean,^[which?] and the Indian Ocean. To a lesser extent, other communities with international commercial links, notably the Armenians, were recruited.

In Arabic the word is ترجمان (tarjumān), in Turkish tercüman. Deriving from the Semitic quadriliteral root t-r-g-m, it appears in Akkadian as "targumannu," in Ge'ez (Classical Ethiopic) as ትርጓም (t-r-gw-m), and in Aramaic as targemana. Hebrew makes a distinction between מתרגם (metargem)—referring to a translator of written texts—and מתורגמן (meturgeman) referring to an interpreter of spoken conversation or speeches. The latter is obviously more closely related to the other languages mentioned, though both are derived from the same Semitic root. There has been speculation of a Hittite origin of the term (Salonen, p. 12; Rabin, pp. 134–136).

During the Middle Ages the word entered European languages: in Middle English as dragman, from Old French drugeman, from Medieval Latin as dragumannus, from Middle Greek δραγομάνος, dragoumanos. Later European variants include the German trutzelmann, the French trucheman or truchement (in post-Tanzimat French, and in modern French it is drogman), the Italian turcimanno, and the Spanish trujamán, trujimán and truchimán; these variants point to a Turkish or Arabic word "turjuman", with different vocalization. Webster's Dictionary of 1828 lists dragoman as well as the variants drogman and truchman in English.

Consequently, the plural, in English, is "dragomans" (not "dragomen").

In the Turkish tradition, the dragoman position is recorded in the pre-Ottoman Sultanate of Rum during the 13th-century reign of Keykubad I when two dragomans and two translator clerks were appointed.

In Ottoman records, the first imperial dragoman recorded was Lutfi Pasha, who was sent to Venice in 1479 to deliver a treaty.

The position took particular prominence in the Ottoman Empire, where demand for the mediation provided by dragomans is said to have been created by the resistance on the part of the Muslim Ottomans to learn the languages of non-Muslim nations. The office incorporated diplomatic as well as linguistic duties—namely, in the Porte's relation with Christian countries—and some dragomans thus came to play crucial roles in Ottoman politics. The profession tended to be dominated by ethnic Greeks, including the first Ottoman dragoman of the Sublime Porte, Panagiotis Nikousios, the official interpreter for the Divan (Imperial Council) of the sultan, and his successor Alexander Mavrocordatos. But this dominance changed in 1821 with the start of the Greek War of Independence.