A Critical Evaluation of Etymological Research Studies on English Words Borrowed from Persian (A Case Study: Dictionary of Persian Words in English)

Research on the scope and spread of Persian words in other languages is known as a significant issue in the field of etymological studies. The findings of such studies have led to publishing various papers and dictionaries nationally or internationally. In this case, for some reasons the English language has attracted much attention. Among the works which has studied the Persian loanwords in English, Mirfazaelian (2005) work entitled "The Dictionary of Persian Words in English" is the one which has been critically reviewed and criticized in this paper. In short, the deficiencies of this work have been descriptively and analytically studied in six categories. The findings show that the introduction of non-Persian words as Persian ones, the introduction of wrong examples, the presentation of incorrect equivalents and false meanings, the presentation of wrong transfer from Persian to English and so on are the main shortcomings seen in this etymological dictionary.