Ali Akbar Dehkhoda

1880 - 1956

A leading reformist voice during Iran's Constitutional Revolution, 1905 - 1911; lexicographer.

Ali Akbar Dehkhoda's journalistic and satirical prose - for example, in Charand Parand (Balderdash) and in engagé (politically concerned) verse (collected in his Divan) - influenced later writers of Persian literature.

During the Pahlavi era (1925 - 1941), like some other literary intellectuals, Dehkhoda left politics to work on academic projects. In the early 1940s, he returned as an administrator to his old secondary school, which had become the Faculty of Law at Tehran University. With the approval and support of Iran's parliament, in 1945 he began work on his Persian encyclopedic dictionary called Loghatʾnameh (Book of words). Some twenty thousand pages later and years after his death, the work reached completion in 1980.

Bibliography

Losensky, P. "Inshallah Gurbah Ast: God Willing, It's a Cat." Iranian Studies 19 (1986).

— MICHAEL C. HILLMANN