Bahar is a Persian name meaning spring.
Bahar (بهار) is the Persian word for spring — the season of renewal, blossoming, and return — and as a given name it carries all of that imagery directly into a person's identity. The word's roots lie in Old Iranian, and it appears in Classical Persian poetry with extraordinary frequency as one of the primary symbols of youth, beauty, and cyclical hope. Hafez of Shiraz, Rumi, and Ferdowsi all invoke bahar as the season when the world remembers how to be alive again; roses bloom, nightingales sing, and the earth sheds its winter grief.
To name a daughter Bahar in the Persian tradition is to give her the whole season as a birthright. As a given name, Bahar is common across Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Azerbaijan, and Turkey, where it functions similarly but draws on the Ottoman and Turkish poetic tradition that deeply absorbed Persian literary culture. In Turkey the name has been used for centuries and remains warmly popular today, particularly in its association with hope and gentle beauty rather than dramatic or grandiose qualities.
In the Iranian diaspora worldwide — in Los Angeles, London, Toronto, Stockholm — Bahar is reliably found, and it travels well: the sounds are easy in most European languages, and the meaning is immediately beautiful once explained. In the broader cultural imagination, Bahar appears in Persian and Turkish film, music, and literature as a character name associated with gentle protagonists and romantic contexts. The Azerbaijani pop and classical traditions have produced several celebrated singers and artists named Bahar. Contemporary parents in Western countries who have a connection to Persian or Turkish heritage often choose Bahar precisely because its meaning is self-evident and lovely in almost any context, requiring no translation to communicate warmth.