Abstract
One of the most important ways that the members of a society express their cultural preferences is through the names they select for their children. Whether it is made by the elder members of the extended family or the parents of the child, there is no doubt that the choice reveals something about the attitudes and values of the selectors through the name's origins and meaning. In societies that enjoy a multilinguistic heritage, first names can be divided into categories according to their linguistic origins. This phenomenon is most visible in societies with long histories of encounters among various cultures. One such society is Iran, whose pre-Islamic Persian culture combined with the culture that was introduced by Muslim Arabs after they entered Iran on a religious crusade in the 7th century. While the Arab conquest did not cause the Persian language to be replaced by Arabic, its impact was nevertheless permanent in the thousands of Arabic words that entered into Persian along with the Arabic alphabet.