What it means
مثلاً (masalan) means “for example” or “for instance.” The word comes directly from Arabic مَثَلاً, the adverbial form of مَثَل (mathal), meaning proverb or parable. Persian absorbed it so completely that most speakers never think of it as a loanword. It slots in at the beginning, middle, or end of a sentence to introduce an illustration of whatever was just said. A close synonym in formal writing is از جمله (az jomle), but masalan is far more common in conversation.
How to use it
- مثلاً تهران خیلی شلوغه. (masalan Tehrân khéyli sholoqe) “For example, Tehran is very crowded.”
- خیلی کار هست، مثلاً خرید، پختن، تمیز کردن. (khéyli kâr hast, masalan kharid, pokhtan, tamiz kardan) “There is a lot to do, for example shopping, cooking, cleaning.”
- میتونی یه چیز دیگه بخوری، مثلاً سوپ. (mituni ye chiz dige bekhori, masalan sup) “You can eat something else, for example soup.”
- بعضی کشورها، مثلاً ژاپن، خیلی منظمن. (ba’zi keshvarhâ, masalan Zhâpon, khéyli monazzaman) “Some countries, for example Japan, are very organized.”
Cultural note
مثلاً is so frequent in spoken Persian that it sometimes functions almost as a filler word, the way English speakers say “like” or “you know” before an example. In formal written Persian the convention is to write it with a tanwin sign (مثلاً), preserving the Arabic grammatical marker even though Persian has no case endings. In casual text messages and social media posts Iranians routinely write it without the diacritic. The word appears in Persian dictionaries going back centuries and is listed in Dehkhoda under مثلاً.