Suluova lies about 25 kilometres west of the provincial centre, in the middle of the broad plain that the Tersakan stream waters and carries down to the Yeşilırmak. To the west it opens onto the Merzifon plain; the highest point of the district is Akdağ. Local sources identify the plain with Chiliokomon, the "Plain of a Thousand Villages" mentioned by Strabo; this is an interpretation, though the geographical description fits. In Ottoman documents the area appears as Argoma or Arguma.
The mounds along the edge of the plain point to a long history of settlement; at Kümbettepe, now surrounded by houses in the Hacıhayta neighbourhood, pottery of the second millennium BC has been found. The endowment deed of the Halifet Gazi Madrasa, dated 1225, lists villages and roads of Suluova among the boundaries of its lands. The historic core is Hakala, now called Yolpınar: recorded in the 1520 survey as the seat of a nahiye and a town of 119 households, the village has the Rifai zaviye founded by Seyyid Necmeddin Yahya in 1348 and the fifteenth-century Kasım Bey Madrasa. The core of today's district centre is Alevi, entered in the same register as a village of 64 households. It became a nahiye in 1903, took the name Suluca in 1944 because of confusion in railway correspondence, became Suluova in 1946 and was made a district on 1 September 1957.
Until the 1950s much of the plain was marshland. Drainage and the Amasya Sugar Factory, opened in 1954, turned it into a plain of sugar beet, onions, wheat and cattle fattening; the factory was the first sugar mill in Turkey to be fully privatised. Lignite found at Eski Çeltek around 1911 is still mined. The area around the Yedikır reservoir was declared a natural site in 1989 under the name Yedikuğular Bird Sanctuary. According to TÜİK figures for 2025, the district has 21 neighbourhoods and 40 villages.
