Hafez
Meaning
guardian, one who has memorized the Quran; Hafez of Shiraz, one of Persian literature's most beloved lyric poets
The story
Hafez is Arabic for guardian, the honorific given to one who has memorized the entire Quran, and it belongs above all to one man: the fourteenth-century poet of Shiraz whose ghazals made him a summit of Persian literature. Seven centuries later his Divan is still treasured in Iranian homes, opened at random on winter nights so a verse can tell the family's fortune, and his tomb in Shiraz draws visitors the way other cities' cathedrals do. Goethe read him in translation and wrote an entire book in answer. In American records Hafez has been vanishingly rare, registering its first flicker only in the most recent decade, which makes it that unusual thing: a genuinely rare pick backed by seven hundred years of devotion, a name practically unused here and utterly beloved somewhere else.
Popularity, 1890–2024
Shape drawn from US Social Security baby-name records. Hafez has stayed rare in US records the whole time: no peak decade to name.
The Hafez deep dive
Whether you’re naming a baby or exploring your own name’s history, this is a personal letter, not a list: where Hafez truly comes from, how it traveled, and what a century of records reveals. If you have grown a tree on nametree, it also considers how Hafez fits with your family’s names and surname.
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