What it means
می (mey) is the pure-Persian word for wine. It carries less weight on the tongue than شراب (sharâb), and it sits inside almost every classical Persian poem about drinking, love, or mystical longing. Translate it as “wine,” but understand the texture is closer to “the wine of the poets.”
How to use it
- می نوشیدن (mey nushidan) “to drink wine” (literary)
- ساغر می (sâghar-e mey) “goblet of wine”
- میخانه (meykhâne) “wine house, tavern” (the poet’s setting)
- می ناب (mey-e nâb) “pure wine,” Khayyâm’s frequent phrase
In the poets
Khayyâm opens his most quoted quatrain with a glass of wine, a loaf of bread, and a beloved under a tree. Hafez closes ghazal after ghazal with می at the center: ساقی به نور باده برافروز جام ما (sâghi be nur-e bâde bar-afruz jâm-e mâ, “Cupbearer, by the light of wine, kindle our cup”). Rumi’s wine is more often شراب, but می shows up in his quieter ghazals. Reading any Hafez page without meeting می is unusual.
Register notes
می is almost never used in everyday speech. If you order wine at a Tehran dinner table you say شراب. می lives in poetry, song lyrics, and old proverbs. The compound میخانه still appears in modern Persian as the name of cafés, bars in the diaspora, and book titles, always borrowing the literary glow. Saying می in casual conversation marks you as either reading too much Hafez or showing off, and that is sometimes the joke.
Cultural note
For Hafez, می is rarely just alcohol. The wine in his ghazals doubles as divine love, the cup is the heart, and the ساقی (sâghi, cupbearer) who pours is the beloved or the divine. Sufi readers treat the imagery as mystical metaphor, secular readers treat it as actual wine, and Iranians enjoy the productive ambiguity. The Pure Persian Movement notes می with affection because it predates Arabic loanwords in Persian, but no one needs to push for its adoption: poetry kept it alive on its own. The compound میکده (meykade), “wine-house, tavern,” became the name of a famous mid-century Tehran nightclub and now hangs over diaspora restaurants from Los Angeles to Toronto.
References
ZabanYar is a Persian app built for heritage learners, the people who can speak a little but want to read, write, and really get it. Free early access at launch.
Join the waitlist →