Allameh Ali Akbar Dehkhoda Bust

Biography

Dehkhoda was born in Tehran to parents from Qazvin. His father, Khan Baba Khan Ghazvini, died when he was only 9 years old. Dehkhoda quickly excelled in Persian literature, Arabic and French. He enrolled at the School of Political Science, which employed, amongst other figures, the Minister of Foreign Affairs and his Secretary as lecturers.

He was also active in politics, and served in the Majles 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 Balkans 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 Majles.

He is buried in Ebn-e Babooyeh cemetery in Shahr-e Ray, near Tehran.

In his article “First Iranian Scholar who authored the Most Extensive & Comprehensive Farsi Dictionary,” Manouchehr Saadat Noury wrote that,

The literary and commentary works of Ali Akbar Dehkhoda (AAD) actually started through his collaboration with Journal of Soor Esrafeel where he created a satirical political column entitled as Nonsense or Fiddle-Faddle (in Persian: Charand Parand). The Persian term of Dakho was his signature or his pen name for that column. Dakho means not only as the Administrator of a Village (in Persian: Dehkhoda or Kadkhoda), but it also refers to a Naive or an Unsophisticated Person (in Persian: Saadeh Lowh).

Works

 

Dehkhoda translated Montesquieu’s De l’esprit des lois (The Spirit of the Laws) into Persian. He has also written Amsal o Hekam (“Proverbs and Mottos”) in four volumes, a French-Persian Dictionary, and other books, but his lexicographic masterpiece is Loghat-nameh-ye Dehkhoda (“Dehkhoda Dictionary”), the largest Persian dictionary ever published, in 15 volumes. Dr. Mohammad Moin accomplished Dehkhoda’s unfinished volumes according to Dehkhoda’s request after him. Finally the book was published after forty five years of efforts of Dehkhoda.

Loghat Nameh Dehkhoda

(The Renowned Encyclopedic Persian Dictionary)
Loghat Nameh Dehkhoda includes more than two million notes written by Dehkhoda during thirty-five years of his continuous work.
The last chapter of Loghat Nameh’s first edition was published in 1981 that is fifty years after its first chapter. The entire series consists of 222 chapters in about 26000 pages. The chapters include 342262 topics and 57457 expressions with documented references to the Persian literary texts. Loghat Nameh Dehkhoda is not an encyclopedia with definition; it contains lots of reference articles on various subjects.
After Dehkhoda’s death, the Iranian Parliament took over his work and entrusted the Department of Persian Language and Literature of the University of Tehran in 1957 with the supervision on Loghat Nameh Dehkhoda. Dr. Muhammad Moi’n, a well-known university professor, who had assisted Dehkhoda in his work over Loghat Nameh, was appointed as the Chairman of the Loghat Nameh Dehkhoda Institute and Dr. Sayyid Ja’far Shahidi, a distinguished academic, was chosen as Vice Chairman.
Since Dr. Moi’n died in 1971, Dr. Shahidi has headed the Loghat Nameh Dehkhoda institute. He also presided over the International institute of the Persian