Persian Name Generator

How the Persian / Iranian Name Generator works

Persian name generator: choosing a name that fits

Iranian surnames are as young as Turkish ones and were made in the same decade: Reza Shah's 1925 law required every Iranian to take a family name, and most were built from a father's name or a home town with one of a few suffixes. The suffix -i, of, gives the commonest type, Ahmadi of Ahmad, Mohammadi, Hosseini, Karimi, and the place names, Tehrani, Shirazi, Esfahani, Tabrizi, Kermani. The suffix -zadeh means born of, Alizadeh, Hasanzadeh, and -pour, son of, Hosseinpour, Alipour; both are patronymics turned surnames. -nejad, of the race of, and -nia, of the descent of, are rarer and give Ahmadinejad. The double-barrelled place names of the regions, Mazandarani, Khorasani, Gilani, Farahani, fill the third list. Iranian women keep their surname on marriage, so a family of four may carry two surnames.

Given names show the two halves of Iran's identity side by side. The Islamic stock, Mohammad, Ali, Reza, Hossein, Mehdi, Fatemeh, Zahra, Maryam, dominates the register, but the Persian revival that began in the nineteenth century gave back the names of the Shahnameh, the Book of Kings, and of the pre-Islamic dynasties, and these are ordinary Iranian names now: Arash the archer, Kaveh the blacksmith who raised the revolt against Zahhak, Babak, Dariush, Kourosh for Cyrus, Siavash, Sohrab, Farhad, and for women Shirin, Roya, Setareh star, Niloufar water-lily, Golnaz, Mitra, Azadeh free. Many Persian names are simply beautiful words: Nasrin wild rose, Parisa fairy-like, Baran rain, Omid hope, Navid good news, Behrouz fortunate.

The Ancient option gives names alone, as the epic and the inscriptions give them, with the optional lineage or place: Rostam son of Zal, Tahmineh of Samangan. The dokht-e form, daughter of, is the Middle Persian construction found in the names of the Sasanian queens Purandokht and Azarmidokht, and Roshanak is the Persian name behind Roxana, Alexander's wife. The spellings follow common English transliteration; Farsi has no capital letters and several of these names are spelled two or three ways in the Latin alphabet.

For the Arabic names that the Islamic stock derives from, the Arabic page; for the Turkish neighbours who share Shirin and Kaveh, the Turkish page; for the Achaemenids in their Greek forms, Cyrus, Darius, the Ancient Greek page.

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