Specialized Vocabulary

Overview

At C2 level you no longer just “know Persian,” you also need to move comfortably across specialized fields. In this chapter we focus on how specialized vocabulary in Persian is built, how it behaves, and how you can strategically expand and control it for academic and professional purposes. The goal is not to memorize long word lists from every domain, but to understand patterns that let you decode new terms and use them accurately.

Sources of Specialized Vocabulary

Specialized vocabulary in Persian comes mainly from four channels: inherited Persian roots, Arabic loanwords, modern international terms, and calques (loan translations). Recognizing these channels helps you guess meaning, register, and appropriate contexts.

Inherited Persian roots are often used in terminology created or standardized in modern Iran. These terms usually feel neutral or slightly more “Persianizing” in style, for example dāneshgāh “university,” māhvare “satellite,” rūz-nāme “newspaper.”

Arabic loanwords dominate traditional scholarly, religious, and legal language, and are also heavily present in modern intellectual vocabulary, for example eqteṣād “economy,” farhang “culture,” qānun “law,” tahqīq “investigation, research.”

International words include direct or slightly adapted borrowings from European languages, especially French and English, such as demokrāsī “democracy,” bānk “bank,” komputer “computer,” mīdiyā “media.”

Calques are built by translating components of a foreign term into Persian, for example hokūmat-e elektronīk “e-government,” hoš-e maṣnūʿī “artificial intelligence,” hašṭag “hashtag,” and bar-nāme-rīzī “planning.”

At C2 level you should be able to sense which “layer” of vocabulary a word belongs to and what that implies about style and context.

Morphological Patterns in Specialized Terms

Specialized vocabulary in Persian is highly regular morphologically. Many complex terms can be unpacked into smaller meaningful parts. This gives you a powerful tool to understand new words and to create accurate technical expressions.

Common nominal patterns

Many abstract or technical nouns are built with predictable suffixes. You will see these in academic articles, legal documents, and specialized media.

Arabic-derived nominal patterns are very common. For instance, roots like ḥ-q-q yield ḥaqq “right,” taḥqīq “investigation, research,” moḥaqqeq “researcher,” ḥoqūq “rights, law.” Learning families of such words is more efficient than memorizing them separately.

Persian suffixes like -i, -yat, -mand, -gī mark qualities, states, or properties. For example, ensān “human being,” ensānī “humanistic,” ensānīyat “humanity (as a value),” honar “art,” honarmand “artist,” honargī “artistic quality.”

Compound nouns are pervasive. Terms such as zabān-šenāsī “linguistics,” dāneš-nāme “encyclopedia,” nezām-e dādeh-hā “data system,” and rahbord-e mellī “national strategy” can all be analyzed into transparent parts once you know the components.

The Persian ezāfe in technical terms

The ezāfe construction is the main device for joining elements in multiword technical phrases. You will often see chains like eqteṣād-e siyāsī-ye jahānī “global political economy” or moʿāhede-ye beyn-ol-melalī-ye ḥoqūq-e bašar “international human rights treaty.”

The logic is almost always: head noun, then modifiers linked by ezāfe. Complex, nested combinations are typical of academic prose, and mastering them is essential for reading and writing specialized texts.

Productive Persian suffixes

Several Persian suffixes are widely used to coin specialized terms. Recognizing them gives you instant clues about meaning and word class.

To take advantage of these patterns, when you meet a new specialized word, try to segment it into recognizable base + suffix, and relate it to other items you know.

Productive Arabic patterns

Because Arabic-derived vocabulary is central in Persian academic and official registers, learning core nominal and participial patterns pays off.

Many abstract nouns in -at / -et correspond to concepts like “science,” “discipline,” “field,” or “phenomenon,” for example falsafe “philosophy,” estefāde “use,” ešterāk “sharing” which relates to moštarak “shared.” The pattern mo-…-e / mo-…-at often gives nouns of profession or result, such as moʿāhede “treaty,” moṭāleʿe “study,” moqaddame “introduction,” moqābele “confrontation.”

Participial patterns in mo-…-ān, mo-…-in, mo-…-er often name people who perform activities or hold statuses, like moʿallem “teacher,” modīr “director, manager,” mostašār “advisor,” moqābel “opponent.” While not fully predictable for all roots, recognizing the general shapes speeds up reading.

Domain Clusters: Academic and Professional Fields

For active professional use you should command a core set of domain labels and be able to recognize their collocations. Rather than listing hundreds, it is more useful to see how these labels are constructed and used.

Academic disciplines are frequently formed with the pattern “[field] + šenāsī” for systematic studies, for example jāmʿe-šenāsī “sociology,” zabān-šenāsī “linguistics,” maʿden-šenāsī “mineralogy,” rūḥ-šenāsī “psychology” in some older usage, now often ravān-šenāsī.

Other domains rely on noun compounds or Arabic abstract nouns: eqteṣād “economics,” ḥoqūq “law,” ʿolūm-e sīāsī “political science,” rīāżī “mathematics,” falsafe “philosophy,” adabiyāt “literature,” honarhā-ye taṣvīrī “visual arts.”

Professional fields often share vocabulary with disciplines but add institutional and applied terms such as sanʿat “industry,” bāzargānī “commerce, trade,” mudīriyyat “management, administration,” mošāvere “consulting,” and mostaqarr-e kār “workplace.”

Be attentive to preposed modifiers like kār-bordī “applied,” nu “new,” motāʿalleq “pertaining to,” tajrobī “experimental,” nazarī “theoretical,” which frequently combine with field names to specify subdomains.

Academic Vocabulary: Core Lexical Set

Specialized academic vocabulary is both cross-disciplinary and domain-specific. At C2, you must handle the cross-disciplinary layer with ease. This includes terms for argument structure, methodology, evaluation, and textual organization.

You will constantly encounter nouns such as moqaddame “introduction,” natīje “result,” bahs “discussion,” naqd “critique,” farżiye “hypothesis,” nazariye “theory,” didgāh “viewpoint,” ravesh “method,” barrasī “examination,” motāleʿe “study,” pāyān-nāme “thesis, dissertation,” maqāle “article,” ketāb “book,” čāp “print, publication,” ersāl “submission.”

Verbs like barrasī kardan “to examine,” tahlīl kardan “to analyze,” taʿrīf kardan “to define,” estedlāl kardan “to argue,” rad kardan “to refute, reject,” taʾyīd kardan “to confirm,” erāʾe dādan “to present,” estefāde kardan “to use,” estenbāt kardan “to infer,” moghāyese kardan “to compare,” and jamʿ-bandī kardan “to summarize” are central to academic prose.

Collocations form an important part of this specialized lexicon. For instance, farżiye tarjīhī “working hypothesis,” čarčūb-e nazarī “theoretical framework,” bonyād-e mafhūmī “conceptual basis,” ravāyat-e ghaleb “dominant narrative,” ravesh-e tavānmiqdrī “quantitative method,” and dādye-hā-ye keifī “qualitative data.”

With such items your goal is not only recognition but accurate productive use in context. Analyze readings to learn which prepositions, ezāfe chains, and verbs regularly accompany each noun.

Legal, Political, and Administrative Vocabulary

Professional and academic communication often intersects with legal and political language, especially in humanities, social sciences, international business, and public policy.

Legal vocabulary tends to be heavily Arabic-based and highly conventionalized. You will see terms like qānūn “law,” qavānīn “laws” (plural), moqarrarāt “regulations,” ʿahd-nāme “charter, covenant,” moʿāhede “treaty,” saḵtār-e qānūnī “legal structure,” ejrā “implementation,” tafsīr “interpretation” in a legal sense.

Administrative expressions cluster around words like dastūr “order,” masbūte “ratified document,” qāṭeʿ “final, definitive,” meyād “deadline,” foryatt “extension,” ḥokm “ruling, decree,” ʿomde “principal, main,” and sāzmān “organization.”

In political vocabulary, expect frequent appearance of terms such as demokrāsī “democracy,” eslāḥāt “reforms,” nezām “system, regime,” sīāsat “policy, politics,” bar-nāme “program,” estebdād “despotism,” šafāfīyat “transparency,” pošīdegī “opacity, lack of transparency,” nezārat “oversight,” entexābāt “elections,” and mošārekat “participation.”

In professional contexts, you should also be comfortable with bureaucratic formulas in letters and reports, such as be etteʿlāʿ-e šomā mī-resānad “it is hereby brought to your attention,” be isteḥżār mī-resānad “it is respectfully submitted,” lotfan eʿlām farmāyīd “please inform,” and dar pey-e “following, subsequent to.”

Business, Economics, and Management Vocabulary

Specialized business vocabulary in Persian combines Persian, Arabic, and international elements. Command of this domain is crucial for professional communication in corporate, NGO, and governmental contexts.

In economics and finance you will regularly notice eqteṣād “economy, economics,” bāzār “market,” arz “currency,” sekke “coin,” sarmāye “capital,” sod “profit,” zīān “loss,” sarmāye-gozār “investor,” sarmāye-gozārī “investment,” bohrān “crisis,” rošd “growth,” rekūd “recession,” torrom “inflation,” boʿd-e eqteṣādī “economic dimension.”

Management and organizational vocabulary includes sazman “organization,” ḥefz “maintenance, preservation,” modīr “manager,” modīriyyat “management,” sazman-dahī “organization” in the sense of structuring, barnāme-rīzī “planning,” esterātežī “strategy,” rahbord “strategy, policy line,” havasel “resources,” manābeʿ “resources,” aʿzā-ye heyʾat-e modīre “board members.”

Business communication also needs terms for contracts, negotiations, and logistics: gharārdād “contract,” mowāfeqat “agreement,” moʿāmele “transaction,” mozākerāt “negotiations,” šarāyet “conditions, terms,” taʿhodd “commitment,” tafāvog “understanding, agreement,” erāʾe “delivery, provision,” tahvīl “delivery,” forūš “sale,” ḵarīd “purchase.”

For professional performance, pay attention to fixed phrases such as bā tavajjoh be “given, considering,” dar ḥāl-e ḥāżer “at present,” dar ḥāšīye “on the margins, in the margins,” az ye so “on the one hand,” az sūye dīgar “on the other hand,” and dar ʿeyn-e ḥāl “at the same time.”

Technical and Scientific Vocabulary

Scientific and technical vocabulary in Persian often follows international models, adapted phonetically or via calque, but the structure of complex terms uses Persian mechanisms such as ezāfe and compounding.

In the natural sciences, you will quickly recognize families such as fizik “physics,” šīmī “chemistry,” zīst-šenāsī “biology,” zīst-motarī “biomechanics” in some transliteration, honar-e mohandesī “engineering,” mohandesī-ye barnāme-nevīsī “software engineering,” hendese “geometry,” rīāżī “mathematics.”

Common scientific affixes appear in borrowed form and combine with Persian stems. For instance, bīo- becomes zīst- in zīst-teknolūžī “biotechnology,” mikro- appears as mīkro- in mīkro-ekteṣād “microeconomics,” and tele- becomes telē- or tele- in tele-komūnikāsīūn “telecommunications.”

Standard collocations like dādye-hā-ye təjrobī “empirical data,” motāleʿe-ye māmorītī “case study,” ʿavāmel-e moʾasser “influencing factors,” naẓāre-ye amārī “statistical analysis,” omūr-e moḥīṭ-zīstī “environmental affairs,” and ostūvārī-ye toseʿe “sustainable development” are useful building blocks in academic writing.

Technical writing in Persian also makes heavy use of binomials and near-synonym pairs, particularly where standardization is ongoing. You may encounter phrases like barnāme-hā va sīāsharhā “programs and policies,” eqdāmāt va ʿamaliāt “measures and operations,” ḥefāzat va mohāfezat “protection and safeguarding,” where both elements together signal completeness or legal precision.

Strategies for Acquiring and Managing Specialized Vocabulary

At C2, the question is no longer “what words do I learn,” but “how do I systematically build and control my lexicon across domains.” Specialized vocabulary grows too quickly to memorize passively; you need explicit strategies.

One essential strategy is to map word families. When you learn a new key term like estenbāt “inference,” immediately connect it to related items: mostanbat “inferred,” estenbāt kardan “to infer,” mostanad “documented,” sanad “document.” This leverages morphological patterns and supports both recognition and production.

A second strategy is to treat collocations as single units. Rather than remembering eqteṣād and siāsat separately, learn siāsat-e eqteṣādī “economic policy” as a fixed expression. Academic reading becomes easier when expressions like ʿavāmel-e moʾasser bar “factors affecting,” dar qeyās bā “in comparison with,” and az naẓar-e nazarī “from a theoretical point of view” are available as preassembled chunks.

You should also maintain domain-specific glossaries. For each field that matters to your work, collect terms, organize them by conceptual subfield, and note authentic example sentences with context. This systematic approach turns your vocabulary into a usable professional tool rather than a random list.

Finally, pay close attention to register. Many specialized terms have both a “high” and a more everyday equivalent, or an imported English form alongside a Persian or Arabic one. Choosing between barnāme-rīzī “planning” and plāning, or between eqteṣād-e bāzār and māket-ekonemy “market economy,” signals your stance, formality level, and target audience.

Vocabulary Table for This Chapter