What it means
قرن (gharn) is the Persian word for a century, meaning one hundred years. It is borrowed from Arabic قرن (qarn), a word with a fascinating range of meanings: “horn,” “generation,” and eventually “a hundred-year period.” The semantic shift likely passed through the idea of a generation as a unit of time. In Persian historical and literary writing, قرن is the standard way to refer to centuries, such as قرن بیستم (gharn-e bistom), meaning “the twentieth century.” A close synonym for a very long, unspecified time span is عمر (omr), meaning lifetime, though it does not refer to a fixed hundred years.
How to use it
- قرن بیستم قرن جنگ بود. (gharn-e bistom gharn-e jang bud.) “The twentieth century was a century of war.”
- این بنا قرنهاست که اینجاست. (in banâ gharn-hâst ke injâst.) “This building has been here for centuries.”
- در اوایل قرن حاضر. (dar avâyel-e gharn-e hâzer.) “In the early part of the current century.”
- چند قرن پیش این شهر بزرگتر بود. (chand gharn pish in shahr bozorgtar bud.) “A few centuries ago this city was larger.”
Cultural note
Iranians use the Solar Hijri calendar (Shamsi) as their official calendar, so the year numbers differ from the Gregorian calendar by roughly 621 to 622 years. When Iranians say قرن چهاردهم (gharn-e chahârdahom), the fourteenth century, they mean the Shamsi fourteenth century, which corresponds roughly to the late twentieth and early twenty-first century in Gregorian terms. This can confuse learners who map قرن numbers directly onto Western history.