Terminology. Iranian-American is used interchangeably with Persian-American, partly due to the fact that, in the Western world, Iran was known as "Persia". On the Nowruz of 1935, Reza Shah Pahlavi asked foreign delegates to use the term Iran, the endonym of the country used since the Sasanian Empire, in formal correspondence.Since then the use of the word "Iran" has become more common in …