Where does the word אשכרה come from, and how is it used in Hebrew to express emotions?
In Avesta, the sacred texts of the Zoroastrian religion written in the ancient Avestan language (a close relative of Old Persian but distinct from it), there is a line that translates to: "Let the duties of the exalted ones be visible and clear among us" (33:7). The word for "visible," awish, evolved into אשכרכּ in Middle Persian and later became אשכרה in Modern Persian. This word carries two meanings: first, as an adverb meaning "publicly, openly"; and second, as an adjective meaning "clear, self-evident."
The word didn’t remain confined to Persian. It journeyed along the Silk Road. In a 12th-century poem by the blind Turkish poet Edip Ahmed Yükneki, we find the line, "All your hidden deeds are made visible," where the Turkish word for "visible" is אשכרה, undoubtedly borrowed from Persian. To this day, Turkish retains this word in the forms אשיכּרה ("clearly, openly") and אשיכּר ("obvious, self-evident").
Even in the East, the word found a home. In Georgian, אשכרה means "self-evident," while in Uyghur—a Turkic language spoken in China and Kazakhstan by around 10 million people—it holds the same meaning.
The word also spread across the Ottoman Empire. In Albanian, it appears as אשיצ'רה, a slang term meaning "openly, honestly, straightforwardly." From Turkish (or perhaps directly from Persian), it even entered some Arabic dialects, particularly in the Persian Gulf and Levant regions. In Kuwait, people use the word at the beginning of sentences, much like "obviously" in Hebrew. Among Palestinians, Jordanians, Syrians, and Lebanese, it means "clear, self-evident."
In Hebrew, אשכרה arrived from Arabic, a relatively recent development. The word doesn’t appear in the 1972 slang dictionary by Dan Ben-Amotz and Netiva Ben-Yehuda. By the late 1970s, it sporadically showed up in the press, often representing the speech of Israelis of "Mizrahi" descent—or at least a stylized version of it. For example, a humorous column by Mirith Shamor in Maariv from March 1977 reads: “In short: What’s there to say, this Etty was insanely gorgeous. אשכרה in the eyes. You hear?” A few months later, Menachem Talmi wrote in the same newspaper: “אשכרה London city. Look at this Oxford; it’s driving a person crazy.”
It’s hard to pin down the exact meaning of the word in these contexts. However, the expression "אשכרה בעיניים" is especially intriguing because it preserves a connection to the word’s original Persian meaning, alluding to something visible, clear, and evident. This marks a transitional phase in the word’s evolution before it acquired its current meaning in Hebrew.
Only in the 1980s did אשכרה become widely used, and its usage solidified. In a 1980 gossip column by Rachel HaMerkhalet, she wrote: "ראיתי אשכרה נגד עיניי את השחקנית." Around the same time, journalist Amos Levav, writing about the "exotic" language of drivers he encountered during reserve duty, described the word as a substitute for "באמת." Indeed, by the 1982 updated edition of Ben-Amotz and Ben-Yehuda’s slang dictionary, אשכרה appears with the definition "באמת, אמיתי, ממשי".
In Hebrew, אשכרה took on unique and complex functions. Primarily, it serves as an intensifier, expressing not just confirmation or emphasis but also the speaker's emotional connection to what is being said. When someone says, "זה אשכרה טעים," they convey not only that the food is very tasty but also their surprise at its quality. As a standalone response ("אשכרה!"), it expresses enthusiastic agreement, often paired with astonishment or another emotional reaction.
From a syntactic perspective, אשכרה can appear at the beginning of a sentence, before a verb ("אשכרה הלך") or an adjective ("אשכרה מטורף"), between a subject and a predicate ("הוא אשכרה משוגע"), or as a one-word response—but never at the end of a sentence. In all its uses, it adds a layer of strong subjective impression, frequently tinged with surprise or disbelief at the described reality.
This evolution in Hebrew—from a word meaning "ברור ונראה לעין" to an emotional intensifier—is unique among all the languages that adopted the ancient Persian word. In those other languages, the original meanings of clarity and revelation were preserved.
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