Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A poetic form of Persian origin, consisting of five or more syntactically complete couplets linked by rhyme and the repetition of a closing word or phrase.
  • noun A poem in this form.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun A kind of Oriental lyric, and usually erotic, poetry, written in recurring rhymes.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun A poetic form mostly used for love poetry in Turkish, Urdu, Arabic, and Persian.

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Persian and Urdu g̣azal (Urdu, from Persian), from Arabic, amatory poetry, from g̣azila, to court, praise with amatory poetry; see g̣zl in Semitic roots.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Persian غزل, from Arabic غزل (gházal, "to display love to the loved one via speech, to exchange talk of love with the loved one").

Support

Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word ghazal.

Examples

Comments

Log in or sign up to get involved in the conversation. It's quick and easy.

  • He felt as he had at seventeen, when, as a Dayton Chaminade senior, he'd set himself the task of writing one Persian-style ghazal a day. Back then, he knew he would become a poet. Now he filled with this sense of awful fraudulence, new lyric possibilities.

    --Richard Powers, 2007, The Echo Maker, p. 315

    November 7, 2008

  • from semitic root - gzl - to spin

    April 14, 2012

  • Ghazal is an Arabic word, which is pronounced as ‘GHUZZLE’, meaning ‘talking to women’. It was developed in 10th century AD in Persia from ‘qasida’, the Arabic verse form. In the 12th century, it was brought up by Moghul invasion in India. This tradition is being practiced in India (Hindi and Urdu), Iran (Farsi) and Pakistan (Urdu). In both, Pakistan and India, the tradition of Ghazal has achieved popularity commercially as well as even set to music too in movies as well as in recordings.

    http://www.yoalfaaz.com/blog/73

    March 5, 2016

  • A poet I once knew named Basil

    Tried hard to impress and to dazzle.

    For verses erotic

    He liked the exotic

    And spurned the dull sonnet for ghazal.

    October 30, 2018