Dehkhoda Encyclopedia

Name of the book: Dehkhoda Encyclopedia is thye greatest Persian encyclopedic dictionary, by outstanding Persian man of letters, “Ali Akbar Dehkhoda”. It contains most of the Arabic, Mongolian, English, French, German and Russian words commonly used in Persian. It also includes all the words in the important Persian and Arabic dictionaries.

The author
Allameh Ali Akbar Dehkhoda (1879–March 9, 1959) was a ####prominent Iranian linguist, and author of the most extensive dictionary of the Persian language ever published. Dehkhoda was born in Tehran to parents from Qazvin. His father died when he was only 10 years old. Dehkhoda quickly excelled in Persian literature, Arabic and French and graduated from College studying political science. He was also active in politics, and served in the Parliament as a Member of Parliament from Kerman and Tehran. He also served as Dean of Tehran School of Political Science and later the School of Law of the University of Tehran. In 1903, he went to the Balkan Peninsula as an Iranian embassy employee, but came back to Iran two years later and became involved in the Constitutional Revolution of Iran. In Iran Dehkhoda, Mirza Jahangir Khan and Ghasem Khan had been publishing the Sur-e Esrafil” newspaper for about two years, but the authoritarian king Mohammad Ali Shah disbanded the parliament and banished Dehkhoda and some other liberalists into exile in Europe. There he continued publishing articles and editorials, but when Mohammad Ali Shah was deposed in 1911, he returned to the country and became a member of the new Parliament.
Works
- Translation of Montesquieu's De l'esprit des lois (The Spirit of the Laws) into Persian.
- Proverbs and Mottos (in four volumes)
- French-Persian Dictionary
- Fiddle-Faddle (Charand wa Parand)
- Dehkhoda Dictionary (his lexicographic masterpiece, the largest Persian dictionary ever published, in 15 volumes. Dr. Mohammad Moin accomplished Dehkhoda's unfinished volumes according to Dehkhoda's request after him)

The dictionary structure
This great encyclopedia was done during 45 years by Dehkhod and some of his friends. By searching into Persian dictionaries, he found that the mistakes in each dictionary had been repeated in other dictionaries and there were also wrong reading and writing. Therefore he first read the versified and prose texts carefully and marked the words and phrases, then assistants wrote the first words on small papers; these notes which were arranged alphabetically, were over three millions. The dictionary includes 2000 words. Most of the entries have the examples of poems and prose, in order to make clearer the meaning of the words and also indicate the evolution historical course of the words and the evolution of its meaning during the period of the history of Dari Persian. There are also the words combinations, Persian grammar and most of the local words, as well as the images of scholars, the plants, animals, maps and the alphabets of different countries written in front of the related words. The dictionary was published in 1980 in 26575 pages.

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