می‌خواد

What it means

می‌خواد (mikhâd) is the spoken-Tehrani 3rd-person-singular present of خواستن (khâstan, “to want”). It means “he wants” or “she wants.” In writing and formal speech the same form is می‌خواهد (mikhâhad), but no Tehrani speaker says the full می‌خواهد in casual conversation. The reduced می‌خواد is the form you will hear in shops, taxis, films, and homes. Persian has no grammatical gender, so می‌خواد covers both “he” and “she” without changing shape; context carries the work English does with pronouns.

How to use it

• چی می‌خواد؟ (chi mikhâd) “what does he want?”
• می‌خواد بره خونه (mikhâd bere khune) “she wants to go home”
• هیچی نمی‌خواد (hichi nemikhâd) “he wants nothing”

Spoken vs written

Spoken Tehrani: می‌خواد (mikhâd). Formal-written: می‌خواهد (mikhâhad). The reduction collapses the medial -ah- and merges with the verb stem, leaving a short, fast form that fits the rhythm of casual Persian. The same pattern hits the whole conjugation: می‌خواهم becomes می‌خوام (mikhâm), می‌خواهی becomes می‌خوای (mikhây), می‌خواهیم becomes می‌خوایم (mikhâym). Use می‌خواهد in essays, news scripts, and official letters; use می‌خواد everywhere else. The practical consequence for learners: textbooks teach می‌خواهد first, but a learner who only knows that form will struggle to follow basic conversation, since the spoken contraction sounds different enough to throw off your ear.

Cultural note

The verb خواستن is one of the highest-frequency verbs in Persian, since it powers polite requests, future tense, and basic want statements. Mastering its spoken contractions buys you a huge amount of natural speech. Iranian listeners almost reflexively register a learner’s level by which form of “want” they reach for: می‌خواهد in a coffee order announces a foreigner reading from a phrasebook; می‌خواد announces somebody who has actually been to Tehran. The verb also drives polite requests via می‌خوام (“I would like”) plus a noun or subjunctive verb, which is the cleanest way to ask for anything in a shop or taxi without sounding rude. That single contraction does more conversational work than almost any other verb form in the language. The negation نمی‌خواد (“he/she doesn’t want”) is just as common, and learners should drill the affirmative and negative forms together so the vowel quality settles into the ear.

References

• Dehkhoda
• Vajehyab
• Wiktionary