Select a root, or search for a word.
Every star is a root family; its size is the number of words that grew from it. Click a root to open its tree.
Pick any two words — Persian or English — and walk the road between them.
Counted from the root charts extracted so far.
Each ribbon is a group of Persian words: from the family of their ultimate root, through the route they travelled.
«فارسی شکر است»
Rishe (ریشه, pronounced ree-sheh) is the Persian word for root. I made this because I love Farsi — the language I think and feel in — and I wanted to see how deep its roots go. Every Persian word carries centuries of travel in it: down from the steppe through Avestan and Old Persian, in and out of Arabic, Greek, and Turkish, sometimes all the way into English and back again. A dictionary tells you this one entry at a time; I wanted a place where you could wander it — follow برق to emerald, watch پردیس become paradise, and see the whole ancestry of a language laid out like a night sky.
Everything here is drawn from Ali Nourai’s An Etymological Dictionary of Persian, English and other Indo-European Languages — a remarkable labor of love charting over 1,600 shared roots of some 4,700 Persian and 3,300 English words. This site is an interactive rendition of his hand-drawn charts; all the scholarship is his, and every chart links back to a scan of the printed page it came from. The book is freely available at the Internet Archive.
The book exists only as a scanned image — no digital text — and ordinary OCR destroys its hand-drawn charts. So the extraction was done by a fleet of Claude (Anthropic) vision-model agents working page by page: each of the 541 chart pages was rendered at 200 DPI, every box was read with the Perso-Arabic script transcribed character by character from magnified crops (diacritics included), the drawn arrows were traced to reconstruct each derivation tree, and the results were checked structurally — every parent link, page number, and script field validated — with disputed glyphs re-read against classical verse where the charts quote Ferdowsî, Hâfez, or Sa‘dî.
Even so, small transcription slips are possible — when something matters, press “View scanned page” under any chart and check the original. Cross-references marked ☞ are the book’s own margin notes (usually one element of a compound), not claims of shared ancestry.
Built by Sajad F. Maghrebi. The data and code live on GitHub.
Choose a word and watch its whole family fan out across lands and centuries — your word’s own road in bright gold.