Vegetables in Farsi: 16 Names With Script and Sound

Short answer: Onion in Farsi is piyâz, tomato is gojeh, turnip is shalgham and eggplant is bâdenjân. Potato is sib-zamini, cucumber is khiyâr and garlic is sir. The table below gives 16 everyday vegetables with Persian script, finglish, and a short kitchen or market sentence for the most common ones.

This is the list you want on your phone when you're standing at a vegetable stall and pointing isn't working anymore. Sixteen names, nothing exotic.

Where a word comes up a lot when you're shopping or cooking, I've added a short sentence you can say out loud. Read them a few times and they'll stick faster than the single words.

Everyday Vegetables in Farsi

For the dishes these end up in, and the rest of the kitchen vocabulary, see Persian food words.

Sentences you can use at the market

The table sentences are worth learning whole. Yek kilo gojeh bekhar means buy a kilo of tomatoes, and you can swap in any vegetable: yek kilo sib-zamini bekhar works the same way.

In the kitchen you'll hear piyâz ro khord kon, chop the onion, and do habbe sir bezan, add two cloves of garlic. Felfel gets the same treatment: yek kam felfel beriz, add a little pepper.

What goes into the pot

Our Persian food words post calls the onion the base of everything in Iranian cooking, and gives eggplant the title of Iran's most versatile vegetable. It turns up in a whey and eggplant dip, and in a northern dish from Gilan that pairs it with tomato.

The same post points out that sib-zamini, potato, literally means ground apple, and that cucumber is eaten with every meal. It also gives a longer name for tomato, which literally means foreign plum.

Small traps in this list

Bâdenjân is marked as the formal spelling, and our food words post spells it a little differently. Tareh covers both leek and garlic chives, and kadu halvâyi is two words for one vegetable, pumpkin or butternut squash.

And if someone calls you a vegetable, that's a different lesson entirely. The vegetable insult guide has you covered.

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.