Browse by origin

Persian Middle Names

80 Persian names with meanings and pronunciation — an Indo-European tradition with its own epic, its own vocabulary and its own gods, routinely and wrongly filed under Arabic.

Start with the confusion, because it is universal. Persian, or Farsi, is an Indo-European language: a distant cousin of English, Greek and Sanskrit, and no relation at all to Arabic, which is Semitic. Persian is written in a modified Arabic script and has borrowed a large religious and administrative vocabulary from Arabic since the seventh century, which is why many Iranians carry Arabic names — Ali, Reza, Fatemeh, Hossein, Mohammad — and why outsiders assume the whole name stock is Arabic. It is not. Beside the borrowed layer sits a deep native one that is entirely Persian in root and often pre-Islamic in origin, and those are the names on this page. Padar is "father" and madar is "mother"; the family resemblance to Latin and English is not an accident, and it is the quickest way to feel that Persian is a different language wearing the same alphabet.

The richest source is the Shahnameh, the Book of Kings, which Ferdowsi finished around the year 1010 after three decades of work, deliberately using as little Arabic vocabulary as he could. It is fifty thousand couplets of Iranian legend and history, and Iranian parents have been mining it for names ever since: Rostam the hero and his son Sohrab, whom he kills without knowing him; Siavash, Esfandiar, Manuchehr, Fereydoun and Kaveh the blacksmith; Tahmineh, Rudabeh, Manijeh, Katayoun and Farangis. Around them stands the older Zoroastrian and Achaemenid layer — Anahita, goddess of the waters; Mehr, the god Mithra, still visible inside Mehrdad and Mehran; Jamshid and Ardeshir; Dariush, whom the Greeks wrote as Darius; Kourosh, whom they wrote as Cyrus; Khashayar, whom they wrote as Xerxes; and Roshanak, the Bactrian bride of Alexander whose name the Greeks turned into Roxana and English turned into Roxanne. A Persian middle name from this layer carries about twenty-five centuries with it.

Iranian naming practice has no middle-name slot. An Iranian has one given name and a family surname, and the surname is a recent thing: family names were only made compulsory in the early twentieth century under Reza Shah, before which people were identified by their father, their town or their trade. What can look like a middle name is usually one of two things. It may be half of a compound given name — Mohammad Reza, Ali Reza, Amir Hossein, Seyed Ali — which is a single unit and is used whole, not split. Or it may be a title: Seyed, also spelled Seyyed or Sayyid, marks claimed descent from the Prophet and is not a given name at all, however often Western forms treat it as one. For a child born in an English-speaking country, the workable pattern is the same one Iranian diaspora families have used for decades — an easy first name that a teacher will not mangle, and the Persian name in the middle, kept exactly as the family says it. Our guide to middle-name traditions worldwide covers the paperwork problem this creates.

Pronunciation is friendlier than the spellings suggest, with three habits to learn. Stress almost always falls on the final syllable, so Dariush is daa-ree-OOSH and Setareh is se-taa-REH, and an English speaker who front-loads the stress will sound wrong even with every consonant right. The letter written kh is a rasp at the back of the throat, in Khosrow and Khashayar; the gh and q of Persian are made further back still. The long "a" is deep and rounded, closer to "aw" than to the a in "cat," which is why Bahar is closer to ba-HAAR. Persian has no "w" sound at all. Transliteration is unsettled, so expect Niloufar, Nilufar and Niloofar; Kourosh and Koorosh; Shahrzad and Scheherazade, which is the same name after a long detour through French. The classical anglicizations are worth keeping in mind precisely because they are already English words: Dariush is Darius, Kourosh is Cyrus, Roshanak is Roxana, Khashayar is Xerxes, Ardeshir is Artaxerxes. Choosing Dariush rather than Darius for a middle name is choosing the Persian original over the Greek transcription of it.

Top picks, annotated

For girls

For boys

Pairing rule for Persian middles: because the stress lands at the end, a Persian middle name pushes the whole name forward, and a stressed-first surname will fight it. Ella Setareh Moore is three stresses climbing and then a wall; Ella Setareh Kamali resolves. The girls' names ending in -eh — Farzaneh, Parvaneh, Banafsheh, Tahmineh — end on a light open vowel and want a consonant-start surname behind them, not another vowel. And avoid stacking the many Persian names built on the same elements: Mehrnaz Mehran repeats Mithra twice, and Golnar Golnaz is one syllable away from a rhyme.

Keep browsing

Neighbouring origins: Arabic, Indian, Hebrew, Greek, or all 24 origin lists. The Shahnameh picks overlap with the mythology list, and the nature names — Bahar, Laleh, Niloufar, Baran — with nature middles; for choosing between the Persian and the Greek form of a name, see the choosing guide.