Persian boy names
Persian names come out of two archives and one dictionary. The archives are Ferdowsi's epic, which gives Iran its heroes, and the imperial record, which gives it its kings; the dictionary supplies the plain modern words — hope, wish, falcon — that Iranian parents have favoured since the twentieth century. Almost every name below belongs clearly to one of the three, and this page says which.
Persian names Americans already know
None of these is in the SSA's 2025 top 100, so you will find no rank numbers here. What they have instead is a route into English that predates any naming fashion: Greek historians, the King James Bible, and a century of ancient-history syllabuses.
- CyrusSY-russPersian
Cyrus II took Babylon in 539 BC and freed the Jewish exiles, which is why Puritan families in England and New England adopted the name in the 1600s. The traditional sun gloss is a Greek guess; the etymology is unsettled.
- Dariusduh-RY-usPersian
He who holds firm the good — Old Persian daraya plus vahu. This is the Greek-and-Latin shape of the name, the one an English speaker can spell.
- XerxesZURK-seezPersian
Ruling over heroes. Old Persian Khshayarsha, put through Greek until barely a consonant survived intact.
- Kiankee-AHNPersian
Kingly; literally the kings, after the legendary Kayanian dynasty. Short, vowel-friendly, and one of the modern Iranian favourites.
- AryaAR-yahPersian
Noble. The Indo-Iranian self-designation that stands behind the country's own name, Iran — land of the Aryas.
Traditional names: the Shahnameh
Ferdowsi's Book of Kings, finished around 1010 CE, is where these people live. An Iranian child does not meet them in a library; they arrive by way of school recitation, television serials and the professional storytellers who used to work the teahouses.
- Rostamross-TAMPersian
Mighty of stature, the strong-grown one. The epic's centre of gravity, and the hero of the Seven Labours.
- Sohrabsoh-RAHBPersian
Illustrious, or ruddy of face — the derivation is not agreed. Rostam's son, killed by a father who did not know him until the wound was made.
- Kavehkah-VEHPersian
The blacksmith who tore up the tyrant Zahhak's testimonial and raised his leather apron on a spear as a banner. Almost alone among these names, he is not a king.
- Jamshidjahm-SHEEDPersian
Jam the radiant. The first king, credited with metalwork, weaving and medicine. Persians still call Persepolis Takht-e Jamshid, Jamshid's throne.
- Siavashsee-ah-VASHPersian
He of the black stallion. Rode through a mountain of burning wood to prove his innocence, then died in exile rather than break a truce.
- Bijanbee-ZHAHNPersian
Glossed as hero by convention rather than by etymology. The lover imprisoned in a pit by the Turanian king and lifted out by Rostam.
- Arashah-RASHPersian
The archer who put his whole life into one draw, fixed Iran's border where the arrow fell, and died at the moment of release. Named in the Avesta, not in the Shahnameh.
- Bahrambah-RAHMPersian
Victory; literally the smiting of resistance. Also the Persian name of the planet Mars, and of six Sasanian kings.
- Farhadfar-HAHDPersian
Won, attained. In Nezami's romance he is the stonecutter who carves a road through Mount Bisotun for love of Shirin.
- Raminrah-MEENPersian
Joyful, at peace. The lover in Vis o Ramin, the oldest surviving Persian verse romance, written a generation before Ferdowsi finished his epic.
The kings: Achaemenid and Sasanian
The imperial layer, and a different thing entirely from the legendary one. Two of these names were effectively out of use for centuries and came back in the twentieth, restored from inscriptions once cuneiform could be read again — which makes them living names in ancient dress rather than unbroken threads.
- Kouroshkoo-ROSHPersian
Old Persian Kurush, cut in stone at Pasargadae, said with a modern accent. The Iranian form of Cyrus, revived along with the Achaemenid past itself.
- Dariushdah-ree-OOSHPersian
He who holds firm the good. The form Persian inherited by ordinary sound change was Dara; Dariush was restored from the Old Persian and is now entirely unremarkable in Iran.
- Ardeshirar-deh-SHEERPersian
Whose reign is through truth — arta, the Zoroastrian word for right order, plus the word behind shah. Ardashir I founded the Sasanian empire in 224 CE.
- KhosrowKHOS-rowPersian
Of good repute. Lands twice: Kay Khosrow of the legends, who walks into a snowfall rather than let power corrupt him, and two Sasanian emperors.
- Parsapar-SAHPersian
The southwestern province the Achaemenids came from, which gave Greek Persis and English Persia. In modern Persian the same word also means pious.
Modern word-names
Persian has a long habit of handing a child a plain abstract noun. These carry no dynasty and no epic, which is exactly why Iranian, Afghan and Tajik families of every background use them.
- Omidoh-MEEDPersian
Hope, straight out of the dictionary. Nothing in it needs explaining to a Persian speaker, and nothing needs teaching to an English one.
- Armanar-MAHNPersian
A wish, an aspiration, an ideal — the thing you are working towards rather than the thing you have.
- PouyaPOO-yahPersian
Dynamic; in motion; one who keeps seeking. A twentieth-century favourite with an approving, forward-leaning feel.
- Behzadbeh-ZAHDPersian
Well born, of good stock. Kamal ud-Din Behzad, working at Herat around 1500, is the most celebrated painter in the Persian miniature tradition.
- Babakbah-BAKPersian
Little father — an endearment that hardened into a name. Babak Khorramdin led a twenty-year rising against the Abbasid caliphate from Azerbaijan.
- Mehranmeh-RAHNPersian
Of mehr, a word that holds the sun, a covenant and plain affection in a single syllable.
- Mehrdadmehr-DAHDPersian
Given by Mithra, the divinity who watches whether a promise holds. The Greeks met the name early and wrote it Mithridates.
- Keyvankay-VAHNPersian
The planet Saturn, from Babylonian kayamanu, the steady one — a Babylonian word living inside a Persian name. In the old cosmology, the outermost heaven.
- Shahinshah-HEENPersian
The peregrine falcon: shah, king, plus an adjective ending, so literally the kingly bird. English borrowed the word along with the bird.
- Shervinshehr-VEENPersian
Traditionally read as lion-like. The derivation is conventional rather than established, so take the gloss as the received one.
- Soroushsoh-ROOSHPersian
Sraosha, the Zoroastrian yazata of hearkening, who guards the soul for three nights after death. In classical poetry, the unseen voice that tells a poet what he could not have worked out.
How Persian naming works
One book does more work here than any institution. Ferdowsi spent roughly thirty years on the Shahnameh and finished it around 1010 CE, some fifty thousand couplets long, written in a Persian so deliberately sparing of Arabic vocabulary that it is widely credited with carrying the language intact through the centuries after the Arab conquest. Iran kept its language when Egypt, Syria and Iraq did not, and the epic is a large part of why. The practical consequence for a name page is that Rostam, Sohrab and Siavash are not antiquarian revivals — they are characters an Iranian family already knows the way an English family knows Hamlet, and choosing one is closer to a literary decision than a historical one. The imperial names work differently: Dariush and Kourosh genuinely lapsed, and returned in the twentieth century on the back of archaeology and the deciphering of cuneiform.
Two things get written about badly and are worth stating plainly. Zoroastrianism is not an antiquity. It is a living religion with communities in Yazd, Kerman and Tehran and a larger related population, the Parsis, in Mumbai and Gujarat, and names such as Soroush and Keyvan belong to a liturgy people still recite. Second, most Iranians carry Arabic names as well as Persian ones — Ali, Hasan, Yusuf are ordinary in Iran, and pretending the registry is purely pre-Islamic misrepresents it. What has changed since the 1990s is the direction of travel: short, unmistakably Persian names such as Kian, Arya, Parsa and Arman have taken a large share of new births, and they read as a preference rather than a protest. For neighbouring traditions, see Arabic names or the full list at names by origin.