Clothes in Farsi: 15 Words, From Shirt to Socks

Short answer: Socks in Farsi is jurâb, and a shoe is kafsh. A shirt is pirâhan, a hat is kolâh, and a jacket or blazer is kot. Dokme is a button, jib is a pocket and âstin is a sleeve. For whole outfits, lebâs-e rasmi is formal attire and lebâs-e varzeshi is sportswear.

Clothes words are small, everyday and easy to practise: you get dressed every morning, so you get a free review every morning too.

The list below has seven pieces of clothing and eight words for parts and kinds of outfit. A few of them, the hat and the pocket, carry idioms worth knowing.

Clothes in Farsi

For the rest of the house, the home vocabulary post picks up where the wardrobe ends.

Parts of Clothes and Costume

The last three rows share their first word, so once you know it you can describe the kind of outfit.

Shoes and socks at the door

Kafsh is a word you'll hear within minutes of walking into an Iranian home, because someone will ask you to take your shoes off. Shoes come off at the door across every class, region and city in Iran. Carpets are a serious investment, sometimes generations old, and outdoor shoes don't go on them. The same rule holds at mosques and shrines.

That makes jurâb more important than it looks. Travellers learn to wear a clean pair without holes whenever they expect to visit a home, mosque or shrine. Slippers are sometimes offered. The word itself came into Persian from Turkic centuries ago, and the same root is still used in Turkish and Azerbaijani.

Hats, shirts and pockets in idioms

Putting a hat on someone means cheating them, as if you pulled the hat down over their eyes. The standard word for fraud is built the same way, literally hat-lifting, and it turns up in news headlines and in warnings about online scams. See the glossary entry for kolâh.

The colour of a pirâhan can say what the day is: white at weddings, black through Muharram and forty days of mourning, dark blues and greys at the office. And jib, the pocket, gives you the word for pickpocket, literally a pocket-cutter. Paying out of your own pocket is described as being eaten from the pocket.

Get it wrong and the worst that happens is a warm laugh and a story they’ll tell for years. Get it right — refuse the tea twice, accept on the third — and you’ll watch a face open up. You didn’t just speak Persian. You played the game.