Jobs and Professions in Farsi: 22 Words From Doctor to Baker

Short answer: Lawyer in Farsi is vakil. Doctor is doktor, the everyday spoken form, and teacher is mo'allem. Other common jobs are parastâr for nurse, mohandes for engineer, rânande for driver and nânvâ for baker. The tables below give all 22 words, split into professions and trades and arts, with short examples.

Job words pay off early. Small talk turns to work sooner or later in any language, and these are the words you need to follow it.

I split the list in two. The first table holds the professions people study for, plus a few everyday jobs. The second holds trades and the arts. If you need the phrases you say at work, those live in business Farsi, so this post sticks to the names of the jobs.

Jobs and Professions in Farsi

If you want the vocabulary of meetings and offices around these words, the Persian business vocabulary post picks up from here.

Trades and Arts

Proverbs about work and money are a good next step once these feel familiar: see Persian money and work proverbs.

Doctor and engineer as titles

Two of these words leave the job behind. Doktor is used as a title of respect, and it goes well past medicine: someone with a PhD, a pharmacist and a surgeon all answer to it, and at family gatherings it sticks for life.

Mohandes works the same way. A taxi driver might call a well dressed passenger mohandes just to be friendly and smooth the ride. For a long time, middle class families pushed their sons toward engineering or medicine as the prestige path, so both titles carry a hint of class as well as a qualification.

Jobs that mean more than the job

The word for nurse, parastâr, also covers someone who cares for an older person at home. Many elderly Iranians live with extended family instead of in a care home, so that role matters a lot.

Tailors are still busy. Many Iranians own at least one piece of clothing made to measure, and wedding outfits and work suits are often made by a khayyât instead of bought in a shop. Bakeries are their own small world too. There are four main kinds of Iranian bread, each with its own kind of bakery, and a family might buy one bread in the morning and another from a different nânvâ for dinner.

The title of cook at home traditionally belongs to the matriarch of the household. The standard thanks to the cook is in thank you in Farsi.

Drivers and writers

Shared taxis follow set routes and pick up anyone heading the same way, which makes the taxi rânande part of daily life. Plenty of people drive for ride apps on the side, teachers and students among them.

Writers are household names. Sadegh Hedayat and Forough Farrokhzad are known far beyond literature classes, and the capital's international book fair draws millions of visitors who queue to meet their favourite authors.

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.