The Collaborative International Dictionary
Usbegs \Us"begs\, Usbeks \Us"beks\, n. pl. (Ethnol.) A Turkish tribe which about the close of the 15th century conquered, and settled in, that part of Asia now called Turkestan. [Written also Uzbecks, and Uzbeks.]
Wikipedia
The Uzbeks (Oʻzbek/Ўзбек, pl. Oʻzbeklar/Ўзбеклар) are the largest Turkic ethnic group in Central Asia. They comprise the majority population of Uzbekistan but are also found as a minority group in Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Russia and China. Uzbek diaspora communities also exist in Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan.
Usage examples of "uzbeks".
For within Turkestan are not only Turkic peoples such as Turkomans, Uzbeks, Kyrgyz, Kazakhs, and Uighurs, but large pockets of Persian Tajiks and Caucasian tribes, and much smaller islands of Balti Tibetans and mongoloid races.
He explained that since his wife’s family was Uzbek and his children half-Uzbek, half-Russian, he hoped at first that the Uzbeks would manage themselves better than the Russians had managed them.
Since the cemeteries in Tashkent are nearly all full, Uzbeks must now be buried in cemeteries as far as forty kilometers from Tashkent.
These scholars also note that post-Soviet Central Asia exhibits more tensions between urban and rural Uzbeks, and between urban and rural Tajiks— not to mention local clan rivalries—than between Uzbeks and Tajiks.
It was these Uzbeks in the early sixteenth century who deposed Babur, the great Turkic poet and the last of Tamerlane’s successors, who consequently fled Samarkand to found the Moghul dynasty in northwestern India.
In truth, it was the Uzbeks who toppled Tamerlane’s dynasty when they defeated Babur.
Prince Kropotkin’s remark in the Britannica’s eleventh edition about the “mixed” nature of Central Asia’s population finds expression in the fact that as early as 1925, even before Stalin’s mish-mash of deportations, farmers in Bukhara could not say whether they were Uzbeks or Kazakhs or Tajiks or whatever.
Moreover, there are 6 million ethnic Uzbeks who live outside the borders of Uzbekistan.
Ethnic Uzbeks also compose 13 percent of the population in Turkmenistan and 12.
Both Tajiks and Uzbeks wonder if Persian-speaking Tajikistan could be a base for Iranian influence in Central Asia.
Some Uzbeks told me that they fear Iran is promoting a Greater Tajikistan, to include the several million Tajiks in southeastern Uzbekistan and the 4 million indigenous Tajiks in northern Afghanistan.
Perhaps Karimov watches the throngs of bored and restless young people at Birlik rallies, knows that half the population is under sixteen, and sees civil unrest in the future—not necessarily between Uzbeks and Tajiks, but also between Uzbeks and Uzbeks, like the clan-based tussles between various Azeri Turk groups in Azerbaijan.
But neither the Persian Tajiks nor the Turkic Uzbeks were like the Persians in Iran or the Turks I had met in Turkey.
And Ulug Beg was among the most Westernized Uzbeks I was to meet in Central Asia.
From Schuyler’s day through 1991, Uzbeks and Tajiks were all subjects of a single authority: the czar, and then the commissar.