Gold, Copper, Glass: 11 Materials in Farsi

Short answer: Gold in Farsi is talâ, iron is âhan, copper is mes and steel is fulâd. For everyday materials, stone is sang, wood is chub, glass is shisheh, cotton is pambe, silk is abresham, wool is pashm and paper is kâghaz. The tables below give each word in Persian script, with an example sentence where we have one.

People usually land here looking for one word. Copper, silver, glass. Fair enough, but these words travel in a group, because the moment you describe an object in Farsi you end up saying what it is made of.

So I put the metals in one table and the softer stuff in another: stone, wood, glass and the three fabrics, plus paper. Eleven words. Learn them once and you can say what most things around you are made of.

Metals in Farsi

The steel sentence is the one to keep: swap fulâd for any other word on this page and you can say what almost anything is made of. For the things these materials end up as, see Persian home vocabulary.

Stone, Wood, Glass and Cloth

Only sang comes with an example here, so for the rest, reuse the steel sentence above. Pambe, abresham and pashm are the three fabrics, which makes them the words to reach for when you are describing a shirt, a scarf or a rug. Kâghaz sits on its own at the end because it fits nowhere else.

What about silver?

Silver is the most searched word on this topic and it is the one missing from the table. Our glossary does not have a clean entry for silver the metal yet, so I left it out instead of guessing.

What the glossary does have is the colour words. There is an entry for silver as a colour and one for gold, golden. If you are describing a car, a dress or a phone case, those are the words you want. For the rest of the colour family, read colors in Persian.

Stone carries the most meaning

Of all eleven words, sang is the one that shows up when Iranians want something to last. Persian cemeteries are full of carved gravestones, which is why the example in the table is sang-e qabr, and many of those stones carry a line of Hafez.

Stone also lives in idioms. One means to defend someone fiercely, literally to beat their stone against your chest, and you still hear it in news commentary. Another, to lay the complete stone, started in masonry and now means going all out, for a guest or for a job. If you only learn one word on this page for conversation, make it this one.

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.