What it means
پروکسی (proksi) is the loaned English word for a proxy server. In general computing it means any intermediate server that routes your traffic somewhere else. In Iranian daily life it has narrowed: when someone says proxy, they almost always mean the specific kind of proxy that keeps Telegram working through the state block, the MTProto and SOCKS5 proxies distributed by Telegram channels and Twitter accounts. The word travels with Telegram as its primary context, even though the technology is older and more general.
How to use it
proxy-ye telegram-am dige kar nemikone.
My Telegram proxy doesn’t work anymore.
پروکسی تلگرامم دیگه کار نمیکنه.
ye proxy-ye salem dari?
Do you have a working proxy?
یه پروکسی سالم داری؟
Proxy vs filter-shekan
The two words overlap but are not identical. A فیلتر شکن (filter-shekan) is the umbrella category for any circumvention tool, usually meaning a full VPN that routes everything on the device. A proxy is one specific technology underneath that umbrella, lighter weight, used inside specific apps like Telegram rather than for the whole device. Iranians who care about the distinction will say پروکسی when they mean the in-app server and فیلتر شکن when they mean the system-wide tunnel. Iranians who do not care use both words loosely, often in the same sentence.
The Telegram economy
After Telegram was blocked in Iran in 2018, an entire micro-economy formed around proxy distribution. Channels with hundreds of thousands of subscribers post fresh proxy links every few hours when the previous batch gets blocked. Some are free and ad-supported, surviving on the channel’s promotional reach. Some charge monthly fees through Iranian payment gateways. The vocabulary of this ecosystem is mostly English-shaped: proxy, port, server, ping, all dropped into Persian sentences without translation.
Where the word comes from
Proxy entered Persian through the IT vocabulary of the late 1990s, alongside server, router, and modem. None of these have received Pure Persian replacements that took root in everyday usage. The Farhangestan has proposed جایگزینسرور (jaygozin-server) for proxy on occasion, but no Iranian uses it. The English word, naturalized with Persian spelling and a kasreh ending, has won. The shift from a niche IT term to a household word happened around 2018, when the Telegram block made proxy a survival vocabulary for tens of millions of users.
References
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