I came across the story on BBC/Persian about moosh-ha-ye bozorg (“big mice”) having conquered our cities [chera moosh-ha-ye bozorg shahr-ha-ye ma ra taskhir kardeh-and?] https://www.bbc.com/persian/articles/ce862jklmdxo at the same time that the train I was on streaked past the huge grain silos in southern Illinois where rats and mice like to gather for a feast!

To be clear: Rats are larger than mice; so the use of the term moosh-ha-ye-bozorg makes logical sense from the standpoint of physical distinction, just like one might distinguish between a shar (“city”) and shahr-e bozorg (“big city”); but, also to be clearer, in taxonomy while mice and rats belong to the order of Rodentia they are different genera. Typical mice (moosh) are in the genus Mus (such as the house mouse), while stereotypical rats are in the genus Rattus. 

Unlike in English, in Farsi we do not have two different names for rats and mice – they are all moosh. There is however the term moush-e koochoouloo (“little mouse”), which is not a zoological term but a term of endearment mostly for a baby.

Obviously, the BBC/Persian story, which was translated from English, necessitated the coinage of the awkward five-syllabic term moosh-ha-ye bozorg to stand in for the word “rats.” The awkwardness of the term comes from the misplacement of the adjective bozorg (“big”), which in this case should have preceded the noun moosh, as in bozorg-moosh – not unlike bozorg-rah, the term invented in the 1970s to refer to highways. This would have yielded a much cleaner way of pluralizing the term. As it stands now, moosh-ha-ye bozorg, while trying to refer to rats still means “big mice” to the Farsi speaker.

Regrettably, BBC/Persian lost sight of the fact that in Farsi we have several zoological terms that use the adjective khar in order to convey the same meaning as large, or big – such as in khar-chang (“big claw” for crab), khar-magas (“big fly” for horse-fly), khar-goosh (“big-ear” for “rabbit”). Therefore, I propose the term khar-moosh to signify rat in Persian, with the plural form being khar-moosh-ha or khar-mooshan.