میره

What it means

میره (mire) is the spoken-Tehrani 3rd-person-singular present of the verb raftan (“to go”). It means “he goes,” “she goes,” or “he/she is going.” The romanization mere appears occasionally in transliteration; the consistent native form is mire, written میره. It shows up in directions, gossip, and any sentence about someone else’s plans. Persian has no grammatical gender, so mire covers “he” and “she” without distinction.

How to use it

• میره مدرسه (mire madrese) “she goes to school”
• کجا میره (kojâ mire) “where is he going?”
• هر روز میره سر کار (har ruz mire sar-e kâr) “every day she goes to work”
• دیگه نمیره (dige nemire) “he doesn’t go anymore”
• داره میره (dâre mire) “he’s on his way”
• با ماشین میره (bâ mâshin mire) “she goes by car”

Spoken vs written

Spoken: میره (mire). Written or formal: می‌رود (miravad). The Tehrani contraction is regular: the formal -av- middle drops, and the -ad ending becomes -e. So miravad becomes mire, mibinad becomes mibine, and miguyad becomes mige. Use miravad in essays, news, and elevated prose; use mire when speaking about anyone in any normal context.

Plural counterparts follow the same logic: می‌روند (miravand, “they go”) becomes میرن (miran). The whole 3rd-person paradigm collapses cleanly: mire (singular), miran (plural), with the formal forms reserved for writing. A learner who masters this single verb has a template for converting dozens of others.

Cultural note

The 3rd-person mire is the workhorse of Iranian gossip. هر روز میره (har ruz mire), “every day he goes,” sets up a thousand stories about a neighbor’s schedule. It also carries the pattern verb for habitual action, since Persian uses the simple present for both “goes” and “is going.” The shade between habit and progressive is decided by adverbs and tone, not verb morphology.

In Iranian families, mire is the verb for tracking a wandering relative: کجا میره این بچه (kojâ mire in bachche), “where is this kid going,” said with a sigh by parents who have given up controlling teenage social schedules. The verb pulls double duty as judgment and observation, depending on who’s saying it.

References

• Dehkhoda
• Vajehyab
• Wiktionary