Persian2 syllablesZoroastrian
Meaning: hearkening, obedience; the angel who brings the message.
Soroush
Soroush is the name of the one who listens. In Zoroastrian scripture Sraosha is attentive hearing personified; by the time the word reaches modern Persian it means the voice that arrives with a message from somewhere else.
| Origin | Persian, from Middle Persian Srōsh, from Avestan Sraoša — a yazata, one of the divine beings worthy of worship in Zoroastrianism |
|---|---|
| Meaning | Attentive listening, and the obedience that follows from it, on a root meaning to hear. In classical and modern Persian the word means an angel or heavenly herald |
| Pronunciation | soh-ROOSH. The first syllable is light and quick, the stress and the length both land on the second, and the final sound is the ordinary English sh. SORE-oosh, front-loaded, is the usual English error |
| Popularity | Outside the current U.S. top 100 and rare in America. A common name in Iran for men born since the 1970s, used by families of every background there |
| Variants | Sorush, Surush and Soroosh are transliterations of one name; Srosh is the Middle Persian form still used liturgically by Zoroastrians |
| Nicknames | None in general use. The name is short enough to survive whole in both languages |
| In the calendar | Each of the thirty days of a Zoroastrian month is dedicated to a divine being: Mehr holds the sixteenth and Srosh the seventeenth |
History & meaning
Sraosha is one of the yazatas, the beings Zoroastrians venerate under Ahura Mazda, and his name is an abstract noun made concrete: sraoša-, from an Indo-Iranian root meaning to hear, is the willing attention that turns hearing into obedience. Two hymns are addressed to him, Yasna 57 and the eleventh Yasht, and his duties are specific. He keeps watch through the night, when the world is least defended. He carries the word between the divine and the human, which is why he is called the messenger. And when someone dies, he guards the soul through the three nights it lingers, then stands with Mithra and Rashnu at the Chinvat bridge on the fourth dawn, where a life is weighed. This is not antiquarian material. Zoroastrianism is a living religion with communities in Iran — Yazd, Kerman, Tehran — and among the Parsis of India, whose ancestors left Iran for Gujarat after the Arab conquest and whose priests recite these texts daily.
The word had a second life in poetry. By the classical period soroush in Persian verse means an angel, or more precisely the unseen voice that tells a poet something he could not have worked out: Hafez calls on the soroush of the hidden world, and the usage is standard enough that a Persian reader meets it without a footnote. That double register is the name's real character: to a Zoroastrian a specific yazata with a place in the liturgy, to everyone else a word out of the poetry Iranians grow up reciting. The philosopher born Hossein Haj Faraj Dabbagh chose it as his pen name for exactly that reason, and has published as Abdolkarim Soroush ever since. For the other names on this side of the tradition, see Persian names.
Why parents choose it
Its meaning is about paying attention rather than winning anything, which almost no name in any language can claim. In Iran it crosses lines easily: it is Zoroastrian in origin and used without hesitation by Muslim and secular families, one of several old religious words that everyone now shares. The sound helps too — soft at the front, decisive at the end — and Soroush has largely won the spelling argument against its alternatives.
Middle names for Soroush
The trailing sh blurs into any middle name beginning with s or ch, so start elsewhere and let the second name run longer: Soroush Adrian, Soroush Jasper, Soroush Daniel, Soroush Leo. The middle names guide has more on pairing a first name that ends in a fricative.
Famous Soroushes
Soroush Lashkari, who records as Hichkas, is generally credited with starting Persian-language hip hop; his 2006 album Jangale Asfalt gave the form its vocabulary and he is still called its father twenty years on. Abdolkarim Soroush, the philosopher of religion and Rumi scholar, took the word as a surname and is among the most widely translated Iranian thinkers of the past forty years. The footballer Soroush Rafiei has played for Persepolis and in the Qatari league.
Consider instead
Mehrdad is the other great divinity name of this tradition, and it names the gift rather than the messenger. Bahram stays religious but exchanges listening for victory. Parsa keeps the devout register with no theology attached to it at all.