A Persian name meaning 'sun,' 'love,' or 'affection,' long associated with warmth and kindness.
Mehr is a Persian name of extraordinary antiquity, carrying within its single syllable two of the most powerful concepts in human experience: the sun and love. In classical Persian (Farsi), mehr (مهر) means both "sun" and "affection, love, kindness" — a semantic unity that reveals how ancient Persian speakers understood warmth itself as a form of love. The name is closely connected to Mithra (Mehr in Persian), one of the oldest Indo-Iranian deities, the god of covenants, light, and friendship, whose worship spread from ancient Persia across the Roman Empire as the mystery cult of Mithraism.
Mehr also gives its name to the seventh month of the Iranian Solar Hijri calendar (roughly late September to late October), when the harvest is completed and autumn light falls long and golden across the Iranian plateau. This monthly namesake gives Mehr a seasonal quality — it belongs to a specific, beloved time of year, the way October feels in the Northern Hemisphere: abundant, cooling, luminous. The Persian poet Rumi uses mehr in his mystical verse to describe divine love, the pull of the soul toward its origin, a warmth that is also a kind of cosmic gravity.
As a given name, Mehr has been used for centuries in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and among Persian-speaking communities globally, for both girls and boys, though it trends feminine in contemporary usage. Among the Iranian diaspora, it carries profound cultural pride — a name untranslatable into English, irreducibly Persian, bearing the weight of one of the world's oldest continuous civilizations. To name a child Mehr is to give them the sun.