Shahrzad

Syllable breakdown

Name meaning and origin

Origin

Persian/Farsi (Iran)

Meaning

a Persian feminine name meaning born in the city or daughter of the city, from shahr (شهر, city) and the suffix -zad (born of, offspring of), with a secondary folk meaning of one who liberates the city; the name is most celebrated as the name of the storytelling queen of One Thousand and One Nights — known in the West as Scheherazade — who saves her own life by telling the king stories so captivating that he postpones her execution night after night to hear each tale's conclusion; Shahrzad is therefore a powerful archetype of female intelligence, narrative skill, and survival through artful speech in the Persian literary imagination; the name became a symbol of Iranian women's cultural power and creative agency and was widely used in Iran through the twentieth century; in post-revolutionary Iran naming practices were subject to regulation, and classically Persian names like Shahrzad have been both restricted and treasured as markers of pre-Islamic Persian cultural identity

Gender

female

Also spelled

Scheherazade, Shahrazad