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Biography

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 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.^[1]

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 Majles.

He is buried in Ebn-e Babooyeh cemetery in Shahr-e Ray, near Tehran.^[2]

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-naameh-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.