What it means
حرص خوردن (hers khordan) combines حرص (hers), an Arabic-origin word meaning greed or burning desire, with the Persian verb خوردن (khordan, to eat). In everyday spoken Persian it has shifted to mean seething with anger or frustration, the kind of helpless, boiling irritation you feel when someone wrongs you and you cannot do anything about it. It captures both jealousy-tinged frustration and raw anger. A related phrase is حرص دادن (hers dâdan), which means to deliberately wind someone up or make them seethe, the causative twin of this verb.
How to use it
- وقتی اون حرف رو زد حرص خوردم. (vaghti oon harfo zad hers khordam.) “When he said that I was seething inside.”
- نذار حرص بخوری، ارزشش رو نداره. (nazâr hers bekhori, arzeshesh ro nadâre.) “Don’t let yourself seethe over it, it’s not worth it.”
- میخواد حرصمو بده، ولی بهش نمیدم. (mikhâd hers-amo bede, vali behash nemidâm.) “He wants to get a rise out of me, but I won’t give him the satisfaction.”
- این آدم حرص منو درمیاره. (in adam hers-e mano dar-miyâre.) “This person drives me absolutely mad.”
Cultural note
حرص in classical Persian and Sufi poetry meant worldly greed or insatiable desire, and that older sense still survives in formal writing. In colloquial Tehran Persian, however, the meaning has narrowed toward frustrated anger. The shift is a neat example of semantic narrowing over centuries of daily use. When a parent says “حرص نخور” to a child, they are not warning against greed but telling the child not to let frustration consume them.