هشت

What it means

هشت (hasht) is the cardinal number 8 in Persian. It comes from the Indo-European root that gave English “eight,” Latin “octo,” Greek “okto,” and Sanskrit “ashta.” Pronounced with the breathy h followed by a clean sht cluster. The h is a real consonant, not silent, and dropping it sounds foreign.

How to use it

• هشت تا کتاب (hasht tâ ketâb) “eight books”
• هشت نفر (hasht nafar) “eight people”
• ساعت هشت شب (sâ’at-e hasht-e shab) “eight in the evening”
• هشت سالمه (hasht sâlame) “I’m eight years old”
• هشت گوشه (hasht-gushe) “octagon, eight-cornered”

How counters work

Hasht uses the standard classifier pattern. تا for general objects, نفر for people, جلد (jeld) for books in formal speech. The noun stays singular: hasht tâ sib (“eight apples”), never hasht tâ sib-hâ. For time, hasht works exactly like English eight o’clock: sâ’at-e hasht-o nim (“eight thirty”), sâ’at-e hasht-o panj daqiqe (“five past eight”).

Cultural note

The number eight anchors one of the most beautiful concepts in Persian aesthetic tradition: هشت بهشت (hasht-behesht), “the eight paradises.” Classical Persian gardens were often laid out in an eight-fold geometry, divided by water channels into a quartered pattern subdivided again, echoing the eight gates of paradise described in Islamic tradition. The Hasht-Behesht palace in Isfahan, built in the Safavid era, embodies this design with its octagonal pavilion and gardens. The number recurs in tile patterns, dome geometries, and book illuminations as the هشت ضلعی (hasht-zel’i, octagon) and هشت‌گوش (hasht-gush, eight-cornered) star. In daily speech, you’ll hear هشت پا (hasht-pâ), literally “eight-foot,” meaning octopus. هشت ماه (hasht mâh) is a common pregnancy reference, since traditional Iranian counting tracks pregnancy in nine lunar months. The expression هشت کتاب (hasht ketâb), “the eight books,” refers to the famous collected works of the modern poet Sohrab Sepehri, published in eight slim volumes that every literate Iranian knows by reputation. In daily speech, هشت‌اش گرو نه‌اشه (hasht-ash gero noh-ash-e), “his eight is mortgaged to his nine,” describes someone living beyond their means with debt outpacing income. The number also figures in the eight days of Hanukkah for Iranian Jewish families and in the eight-pointed star (ستاره هشت‌پر, setâre-ye hasht-par) found across Iranian tile work from Tabriz to Yazd.

References

• Dehkhoda
• Vajehyab