What it means
آرماتور (ârmâtur) means rebar or reinforcement bar, the steel rods or mesh embedded inside concrete to give it tensile strength. The word is a direct borrowing from French “armature” (framework, reinforcing structure), which itself derives from Latin “armatura” (equipment, armor). It arrived in Persian through the adoption of European construction engineering practices in the twentieth century. On Iranian construction sites آرماتور refers specifically to the steel skeleton assembled before concrete is poured. The technical synonym is میلگرد (milgard), which is a native Persian compound meaning roughly “round rod,” and is increasingly preferred in engineering documentation, though آرماتور remains the dominant word in speech among workers and contractors.
How to use it
- آرماتور ستونها رو بستن. (Ârmâtur-e sotunhâ ro bastan.) “They tied the rebar for the columns.”
- کیفیت آرماتور مهمه. (Keyfiyat-e ârmâtur mohemme.) “The quality of the rebar matters.”
- قبل از بتنریزی آرماتور رو چک کردن. (Ghabl az beton-rizi ârmâtur ro chek kardan.) “They checked the rebar before pouring the concrete.”
- آرماتورکشی دو روز طول کشید. (Ârmâtur-keshi do ruz tul keshid.) “Laying the rebar took two days.”
Cultural note
Reinforced concrete construction, known in Persian as بتون مسلح (beton-e mosallah), became the dominant building method in Iran from the mid-twentieth century onward and is now almost universal in urban residential and commercial construction. The quality and correct placement of آرماتور is particularly critical in Iran because large parts of the country sit on active seismic fault lines. The 2003 Bam earthquake, which destroyed a historic city largely built from unreinforced mud brick, intensified national attention to proper steel reinforcement standards in new construction. Inspecting the آرماتور before concrete is poured is now a mandatory step in licensed building projects.