Chahrazad — Shahrazad — the storyteller of One Thousand and One Nights.

Chahrazad is the Maghrebi French-influenced spelling of شهرزاد (Shahrazād), the legendary storyteller of Alf Layla wa-Layla (One Thousand and One Nights). The Persian etymology breaks the name into shahr (city, kingdom — though some scholars read it as 'a thousand') and zād (free-born, of noble descent). The framing tale of the Nights describes how the Sasanian king Shahriyār, having been betrayed by his first wife, took to marrying a virgin each night and executing her in the morning. Shahrazād, daughter of the vizier, volunteered to marry the king and saved her life — and the lives of all the women who would have followed — by telling him a story each night, breaking off at dawn so that he had to spare her until the next nightfall.

The figure of Shahrazād has become one of the great archetypes of world literature: the storyteller as moral agent, the woman whose tongue is more powerful than the king's sword. The Maghrebi Chahrazad is standard in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia; the Mashriqi Sheherazade or Shahrazad is more common in Egypt and the Gulf; the Turkish form is Şehrazat.

The name carries a Persian-Arabic compound through Maghrebi phonology. A bearer of Chahrazad is named into a story-as-survival tradition: the woman whose words created the world she would otherwise have lost.