Fruits in Farsi: 23 Names With Script and Sound

Short answer: The Farsi word for apple is sib, watermelon is hendevâne (in everyday speech you'll hear hendoone), and pomegranate is anâr. Other fruits you'll meet every day are porteghâl for orange, moz for banana, holu for peach, zardâlu for apricot and angur for grapes. The tables below give all 23 with script and sound.

If you've searched for one fruit word, it was probably apple. Sib is short and easy to say, and you'll find it hiding in other words too: Iranians named the potato an earth apple.

I've split the list in two. First come the fruits you'll see piled up at a fruit stand, then the dried fruit and nuts that end up in a bowl at every family gathering. Each word links to its glossary page if you want more examples.

Everyday Fruit in Farsi

For the dishes a lot of these fruits end up in, have a look at Persian food words.

Dried Fruit and Nuts

Dried fruit and nuts get their own list, because in Iran they're a whole category of snacking on their own.

How to Ask for Fruit at the Market

Look at the example sentences in the first table. Yek sib mikhâham means I want an apple, and it's the version you'd find in a textbook. Swap in any fruit from the list and it still works, which is exactly what yek porteghâl mikhâham does.

Out on the street people clip it. In yek tekke hendoone mikhâm, I want a piece of watermelon, the written hendevâne becomes hendoone and mikhâham shrinks to mikhâm. That's how you'll hear it at a stall, so it's worth getting your ear used to both. Yek moz bedeh, give me a banana, is the other shape you'll need: a straight request. There's more of this in market vocabulary in colloquial Farsi.

Words That Trip Learners Up

Porteghâl is the orange you peel and eat. The colour orange is a different word altogether, named after the bitter orange, and colors in Persian walks through where it comes from.

Tut on its own is the mulberry. Add farangi and you get tut farangi, strawberry, which literally means the Frankish or foreign berry. Iranians used farangi for things that arrived from Europe.

Gilâs and âlbâlu are both cherries. Gilâs is the sweet one you eat by the handful; âlbâlu is the sour cherry, and it goes into cooking, syrup and jam.

Fruit on Yalda Night and at Nowruz

Anâr has a job on the longest night of the year. On Yalda, Iranians eat pomegranates to stand for the sun, and a bowl of âjil gets passed around with them, along with poetry. If you're going to a Yalda gathering, the Yalda night survival guide tells you what to expect.

Âjil comes back at Nowruz too: every holiday visit to a relative means tea, sweets, fruit and a bowl of it. You can read more about the new year in Nowruz, the Persian New Year.

And sib has a life in poetry, where an apple stands for red cheeks and beauty.

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.