مجنون

What it means

مجنون (majnun) means mad, crazed, out of your mind, and most often it means crazed with love, someone so obsessed with a person that they’ve lost their sense. It’s an Arabic loanword, from the root ج ن ن (jann), the same root behind جن (jenn, jinn), so majnun literally paints someone as possessed. In everyday Persian it can also just mean “nuts” or “reckless” without any romance attached, similar to دیوونه (divune, crazy), though divune is the more casual everyday word and majnun leans a bit more literary and dramatic.

How to use it

• واسه‌ش مجنون شدم (vaseh-sh majnun shodam) “I went crazy for her/him”
• مجنون این دختره‌س (majnun-e in dokhtare-s) “He’s madly in love with this girl”
• مثل مجنون دنبالش می‌گشت (mesle majnun donbal-esh migasht) “He was searching for her like a madman”
• لیلی و مجنون رو خوندی؟ (Leyli o Majnun ro khondi?) “Have you read Leyli and Majnun?”

Cultural note

Majnun is the nickname of Qays ibn al-Mulawwah, the hero of an old Arabian love story that the Persian poet Nezami Ganjavi turned into the epic romance Leyli o Majnun in the twelfth century. The story became one of the most retold love tragedies across the Persian, Arabic, and Turkish literary worlds, so much that “majnun” on its own now stands for any lover driven half-mad by longing. Persian poets from Nezami to Hafez lean on the Leyli o Majnun image constantly, so knowing the word unlocks a huge chunk of classical poetry references.

References

• Dehkhoda
• Vajehyab