What it means
خشکسالی (khoshksali) means drought: a prolonged period of abnormally low rainfall that causes water shortages, crop failure, and ecological stress. The word is a fully native Persian compound: خشک (khoshk, dry) plus سال (sal, year) plus the abstract noun suffix ی (i). Literally it reads as something like dryness-of-the-year. There is no commonly used single-word synonym; the concept is almost always expressed with this one word. Its opposite is ترسالی (tarsali), a wet or rainy year, built on the same pattern.
How to use it
- ایران چند ساله درگیر خشکسالیه. (Iran chand sale dargir-e khoshksaliye.) “Iran has been dealing with drought for several years.”
- خشکسالی آب دریاچه ارومیه رو کم کرد. (khoshksali ab-e daryache-ye orumie ro kam kard.) “The drought reduced the water level of Lake Urmia.”
- کشاورزا از خشکسالی خسارت دیدن. (keshavarzha az khoshksali khasarat didan.) “Farmers suffered losses from the drought.”
- پیشبینی هواشناسی خشکسالی رو تایید کرد. (pish-bini-ye havashenas khoshksali ro tayid kard.) “The meteorology forecast confirmed the drought.”
Cultural note
Drought is not a distant abstraction for Iranians: the country sits largely on an arid plateau and has experienced intensifying droughts since the 1990s. The drying of Lake Urmia, once the largest saltwater lake in the Middle East, became a national symbol of water crisis driven partly by prolonged khoshksali and partly by agricultural over-extraction. Water scarcity (بحران آب, bohran-e ab) and drought appear regularly in Iranian news, policy debates, and even social media as concerns that affect food prices and rural migration.