Today it means: A grammatical particle found in some Iranian and Iranian-influenced languages which links two words together; it consists of the unstressed vowel -e / -ye (Persian, Bengali, Hindi-Urdu, Punjabi), -i / -yi (Classical Persian, Kurdish, Bengali, Hindi-Urdu, Punjabi, Ottoman Turkish, Turkish), or -ı (Ottoman Turkish, Turkish) between the words it connects, and often approximately corresponds in usage to the English preposition "of", similar to but not to be confused with Arabic ʾiḍāfa. Full definition →
Borrowed from Iranian Persian اِضافِه (ezâfe), from Classical Persian اِضَافَه (izāfa), from Arabic إِضَافَة (ʔiḍāfa). Doublet of ʾiḍāfa.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.