NASA WISE infrared view of the Pleiades star cluster, called Soraya or Thuraya in Persian and Arabic

What Does Soraya (ثریا) Mean? The Persian Name in the Stars

Soraya—written ثریا—is a familiar feminine name in Iran, but its oldest meaning is not “princess,” “jewel,” or simply “beautiful.” Soraya is the Persian pronunciation of an Arabic-origin name for the Pleiades star cluster. In Persian, the same group of stars is also called Parvin (پروین).

That celestial meaning gives the name its imagery: a compact gathering of bright stars, visible without a telescope and recognized by cultures around the world. It also explains why ثریا appears so often in Persian poetry as a symbol of height, brilliance, order, and things gathered closely together.

How do you write Soraya in Persian?

Soraya is written ثریا. The letters are:

  • ث — pronounced s in modern Iranian Persian
  • ر — r
  • ی — part of the middle y sound
  • ا — the final long â sound

A careful Persian pronunciation is approximately so-ray-YÂ, with the stress at the end. The middle consonant may sound doubled, which is why the name is sometimes romanized Sorayya. In ordinary English, Soraya is the most familiar spelling.

Soraya, Thuraya, Suraya, and Sorayya: are they the same name?

These spellings generally represent the same underlying name in different languages and romanization systems:

  • Soraya — the common Iranian Persian and international spelling
  • Sorayya — shows the doubled y more explicitly
  • Thuraya — closer to the standard Arabic pronunciation of ثُرَيّا
  • Thoraya — another Arabic-to-English spelling
  • Suraya — used in several languages and communities

Persian pronounces the letter ث as s, while standard Arabic gives it the th sound heard at the beginning of “three.” That is why Thuraya becomes Soraya without changing the Persian-script spelling.

What does ثریا literally mean?

The Dehkhoda Dictionary entry for ثریا identifies it with Parvin, the traditional Persian name for the Pleiades. It also records ثریا as a woman’s name and preserves many literary examples.

The safest English meaning is therefore “the Pleiades” or “the Pleiades star cluster.” Looser descriptions such as “a cluster of stars” or “the Seven Sisters” communicate the image, though the latter name comes from Greek tradition.

Some modern name websites translate Soraya as “princess,” “gem,” or “rich.” Those associations may sound attractive, but they are not the direct dictionary meaning used in Persian. The historically grounded meaning is the star cluster.

What is Parvin (پروین)?

Parvin is the Persian name for the same group of stars. Dehkhoda’s entry for پروین describes a small group of stars gathered like a bunch of grapes and explicitly says that Arabic calls it ثریا.

Both Soraya and Parvin became feminine names in Iran. Their origins differ—Soraya is Arabic in origin, while Parvin is Persian—but their shared reference is the Pleiades. Calling one name “real Persian” and the other foreign misses how Persian vocabulary actually developed: Arabic-origin words have been part of Persian literature and daily speech for centuries.

What are the Pleiades?

The Pleiades, catalogued by astronomers as Messier 45 or M45, are an open star cluster in the constellation Taurus. An open cluster is a group of stars that formed together and remain loosely connected by gravity.

NASA’s WISE guide to the Pleiades places the cluster about 436 light-years from Earth and describes it as roughly 100 million years old. The bright grouping is especially prominent during Northern Hemisphere winter. Although tradition often calls it the Seven Sisters, most viewers see about six stars with the unaided eye; telescopes and astronomical surveys reveal many more.

The colorful clouds in NASA’s infrared image are dust through which the cluster is passing. Blue and cyan primarily represent shorter infrared wavelengths dominated by stars, while green and red trace longer wavelengths associated with warmer dust. These are representational colors rather than what a person would see by looking up at night.

A 2025 discovery made the Pleiades much larger

The familiar knot of visible stars is only the central part of a far wider stellar family. On November 20, 2025, NASA reported that researchers using data from the TESS and Gaia missions had identified a Greater Pleiades Complex.

According to NASA’s report on the discovery, scientists combined three kinds of evidence: the stars’ movement around the Milky Way, their chemical composition, and their rotation rates. The resulting group contains more than 3,000 associated stars spread across about 1,900 light-years—roughly tripling the number linked to the Pleiades.

The new finding does not mean that 3,000 stars suddenly became visible beside one another. It means astronomers can now identify far-flung relatives that likely formed from the same molecular cloud about 100 million years ago and later dispersed. The ancient name still points to the bright cluster people recognize, while modern data reveal a much larger family stretching across the sky.

Soraya in Persian poetry

Persian poets used ثریا and پروین long before either became a modern product motif or an internationally familiar first name. Because the Pleiades appear high, bright, and tightly grouped, the cluster offered poets several ready metaphors.

Height and ambition

Dehkhoda records the expression به ثریا رسیدن—“to reach Soraya/the Pleiades”—for rising to one’s peak or attaining great height. A palace, mountain, reputation, or aspiration could be imagined as reaching the cluster.

A jeweled cluster

The stars’ close arrangement invited comparisons to pearls, teeth, blossoms, beads, and jewels. Dehkhoda even records مثل ثریا, “like the Pleiades,” in the sense of being gathered or assembled.

A marker of the night sky

The dictionary’s literary examples include Ferdowsi, Naser Khosrow, Attar, Rumi, Saadi, and other poets. An authoritative Persian encyclopedia entry on Parvin or Soraya in Persian and Arabic literature likewise notes that the cluster often represents extreme height above the earth. The image works because readers already knew what the stars looked like and where they belonged in the seasonal sky.

Was Soraya the name of an Iranian queen?

Yes. Soraya Esfandiary-Bakhtiary, born in Isfahan in 1932, was the second wife of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and queen consort of Iran from 1951 until their divorce in 1958. Her international fame made the spelling Soraya especially recognizable outside Iran.

She did not create the name or its meaning. ثریا had already existed for centuries as the name of the Pleiades and as a Persian literary image. The queen is one prominent Iranian bearer of a much older name.

Why the name still resonates in the diaspora

For Iranian families abroad, Soraya can feel both immediately Persian and internationally portable. English speakers can pronounce it without much difficulty, while Persian speakers recognize its script, sound, and poetic background.

The name also joins two kinds of continuity. One is cultural: the same word appears in classical verse, family histories, and twentieth-century Iranian public life. The other is astronomical: people in Tehran, Toronto, Los Angeles, or anywhere with a clear night sky can look toward the same cluster.

That makes Soraya more than a decorative word. It is a name tied to gathering, light, distance, and shared orientation—ideas that can carry particular weight for families living far from Iran.

Wearing ثریا as Persian calligraphy

Tute’s Persian Calligraphy T-Shirt places ثریا in a small, understated chest design. The script is not a generic Arabic-style emblem: it spells the name Soraya, with its specific Persian pronunciation and Pleiades meaning.

That context changes how the design reads. For someone named Soraya, it can be personal. For someone drawn to Persian poetry or astronomy, it can represent a cluster of light. For a diaspora wearer, it can quietly carry a name that belongs in both family memory and the night sky.

The short answer

Soraya (ثریا) means the Pleiades star cluster. It is an Arabic-origin word fully established in Persian, pronounced roughly so-ray-YÂ, and used both as a feminine name and a poetic image. Its traditional Persian equivalent is Parvin (پروین).

The name does not literally mean “princess.” Its real meaning is more distinctive: a famous gathering of stars whose wider family, modern astronomy now shows, reaches much farther than people once knew.

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