Persian2 syllablesShahnameh
Meaning: Jam the radiant; the shining king.
Jamshid
| Origin | Persian — the mythical world-king of the Shahnameh, from Avestan Yima Xshaeta |
|---|---|
| Meaning | Jam the radiant: the personal name Yima plus xshaeta (shining, radiant), which becomes -shid in modern Persian |
| Pronunciation | jahm-SHEED (two syllables, the second long) |
| Popularity | Outside the current U.S. top 100. A standard name in Iran, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, and in the Parsi form Jamshed across western India |
| Variants | Jamshed, Jamsheed, Jamsetji and Jamshedji (Parsi), Jamshid (Tajik), Cemsit (Turkish) |
| Nicknames | Jam — which is not a shortening at all but the older form of the name, the Avestan Yima |
| Place name | Persepolis is Takht-e Jamshid, the throne of Jamshid, in Persian |
History & meaning
Jamshid is two words worn into one. The Avestan figure is Yima Xshaeta, Yima the radiant, and the epithet survives in modern Persian as the ending -shid, the same element in khorshid, the sun. Yima is old enough to be shared: he is the same Indo-Iranian figure as Vedic Yama, who in India became lord of the dead and in Iran became the first king. The Avesta has him building a vara, a walled underground refuge stocked with the seed of every living thing, to survive a killing winter, which is why he keeps getting compared to Noah.
Ferdowsi gives him a reign of seven hundred years and the invention of nearly everything: metalworking and weapons, weaving and dyeing, medicine, perfume, shipbuilding, and a society sorted into four estates. Then he declares himself divine, the farr or royal glory deserts him, and Zahhak saws him in half. Two things attach to him outside the poem. The spring festival of Nowruz is said to begin on the day Jamshid took his jewelled throne and was raised into the air by demons, and the people called it the New Day. And when later Persians looked at the vast Achaemenid ruins near Shiraz, they no longer knew who Darius or Xerxes had been, so they called the place Takht-e Jamshid, Jamshid's throne. That is still the Persian name for Persepolis. His seven-ringed cup, the Jam-e Jam, in which the whole world could be seen, is one of the standing images of Persian poetry.
Why parents choose it
It sounds like what it means. The long second syllable gives the name a lift, and the association is with light, invention and the new year rather than with war, which sets it apart from most of the epic's roster. It also has a real second life in India, where Parsi families have used Jamshed for generations.
Middle names for Jamshid
Something short and closed steadies the run of the name: Jamshid Kai, Jamshid Reza, Jamshid Paul, Jamshid Noor. The middle names guide explains why a one-syllable middle usually wins here.
Famous Jamshids
Jamsetji Tata (1839 to 1904) founded the Tata group and gave his name to the city of Jamshedpur; his is the Parsi form of exactly this name. Jamshid Amouzegar (1923 to 2016) was prime minister of Iran in 1977 and 1978 and, earlier, a long-serving OPEC negotiator. The mathematician Jamshid al-Kashi, who worked at Ulugh Beg's observatory in Samarkand in the 1420s, computed pi to sixteen decimal places.
Consider instead
Kian is the same royal idea in one easy syllable pair. Khosrow moves from myth to the Sasanian kings and keeps the grandeur. Cyrus is the Persian king name English already knows.