Persian bazar, possibly from Pahlavi baha-char, the place of prices, or Old Iranian vaha-carana, sale and traffic, spread with Persian commerce and administration into Turkish, Arabic, Hindi, and across Central and Southeast Asia: pasar in Indonesia, vásár in Hungary, pazari in Greece. English took it from Italian bazarra in the 1580s. No relation to bizarre, despite centuries of punning.
The bazaar was never just shops: guilds organized it by craft, caravanserais fed it, and it ran bargaining, news, credit, and politics as one system. French drifted bazar toward clutter and junk; English kept the exotic market and the charity sale. The open-source world borrowed the word for its bazaar model of development, many vendors, no cathedral, trusting the swarm over the plan.
The claim: bazar is the most durable Persian export because it names not a place but a protocol, decentralized exchange under negotiated rules, and empires fall while protocols replicate; Persian is spoken in three countries, but bazar is spoken in fifty. Verdict: the linguistic census supports it. Words that name systems outlive words that name things. The bazaar sold the world its own name, wholesale.
Why does the world's most global word for commerce come from one country's streets?