Allameh Ali Akbar Dehkhoda's Life and Work

Allameh Ali Akbar Dehkhoda was born in Tehran in 1881 AD. His father, Khan Baba Khan, one of the landowners in Qazvin, died when Dehkhoda was ten years old.
During his adolescence Dehkhoda learned French along with parallel to his religious and literary studies. His fluency in French allowed him to accompany Iran's ambassador to Balkans and completed his education in Europe.
Dehkhoda's return to Iran coincided with the Mashroutiat (Constitutional) Revolution. When he wrote some satiric subjects in a newspaper, he had chosen DAKHO as a nickname for himself. After Muhammad Ali Shah dissolved the parliament. Dehkhoda as well as many other intellectuals, among them Allameh Muhammad Qazvini, was exiled to Europe.
During World War I, Dehkhoda spent most of his time in seclusion in a village in Chahar Mahal Bakhtiari in western Iran. When the war ended, he came back to Tehran. He put politics aside and dedicated himself to research on the Persian language, literature and culture. He was also a satirist. Dehkhoda died in 1955 in Tehran and was buried near the city of Rayy.

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