What it means
میرچ (mirch) is the everyday colloquial name for chilli pepper or hot pepper in Iranian street speech. It is borrowed from Hindi-Urdu mirch, which itself descends from Sanskrit maricha. The word travelled into Persian informal registers through trade and cultural contact with the Indian subcontinent. In more formal or written Persian the same vegetable is called فلفل تند (felfel-e tond, “hot pepper”) or فلفل قرمز (felfel-e ghermez, “red pepper”), so میرچ marks the speaker as using casual, market-register language. It has no Arabic root, despite surface similarity to some Arabic words.
How to use it
- میرچ نریز، تند میشه. (Mirch nariz, tond mishe.) “Don’t put chilli in it, it will get spicy.”
- یه دونه میرچ سبز میخوام. (Ye dune mirch-e sabz mikhâm.) “I want one green chilli.”
- این ترشی پر میرچه. (In torshi por mirch-e.) “This pickle is full of chilli.”
- میرچ خشک داری؟ (Mirch-e khoshk dâri?) “Do you have dried chilli?”
Cultural note
Chilli pepper arrived in Iran relatively late, after Spanish traders brought it from the Americas to Asia in the sixteenth century, and it spread across the subcontinent and into Persian-speaking regions via India. Because the word travelled the same route as the spice itself, the Hindi-Urdu name میرچ stuck in colloquial Persian alongside the more formal فلفل تند. Today you will hear میرچ at bazaar spice stalls and in home kitchens across Iran, particularly in regions closer to the border with Afghanistan and Pakistan where Hindi-Urdu influence is stronger. In Iranian cooking, dried red mirch is used to make a paste called رب فلفل (rob-e felfel) used in some southern and eastern dishes.