Entry № 9325 · Persian origin

Scheherazade Scheherazade — Meaning, Origin & Baby Name Popularity

/ sheh-HEH-rah-zad /
Gender
Girl
Origin
Persian
Meaning
"Of noble lineage (frame narrator of One Thousand and One Nights)"
Syllables
4
First recorded
Medieval (Persian)

A name that means "of noble lineage (frame narrator of one thousand and one nights)".

Scheherazade (Persian Shahrazād, from shahr = city + āzād = noble, free) is the frame narrator of Alf laylah wa-laylah (One Thousand and One Nights / The Arabian Nights). The vizier's daughter who volunteers to marry the misogynist King Shahryar — who has been killing each new bride at dawn since being betrayed by his first wife — and who saves her own life and the lives of all future Persian women by telling the king cliffhanging tales for 1,001 nights.

Subject of Rimsky-Korsakov's symphonic suite Scheherazade (1888).

Of noble lineage.

The name in its native script.

شهرزاد
Transliteration
Shahrazād
Pronunciation
/ ʃəˌhɛr.əˈzɑːd /
Root
Grammatical form

Where Scheherazade stands.

Scheherazade does not currently appear in the US Social Security Administration's top 1,000 girls' names, so we don't publish a US rank or birth count for it. That says nothing about the name's standing elsewhere in the world — only that it sits outside the ranked US data we rely on.

Scheherazades before her.

Real people
Scheherazade
Frame narrator of Arabian Nights.
In fiction
Scheherazade
Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade.
1888

Names connected to Scheherazade.

The number behind Scheherazade.

4

The Builder

In Pythagorean numerology the letters of Scheherazade reduce to 4, The Builder. This is a traditional interpretive system, not a factual claim about the name.