Grammatical and Rhetorical Analysis of the Al-wāfi fī Te‘dāde-l Qawāfī by Mohammad 'Assar-e Tabrizi

Rhyme is of great importance and place in Persian poetry; For this reason, and to facilitate the work of poets, books in the form of rhyming dictionaries have been written from the distant past to the present. One of the most prestigious and famous of these dictionaries is Al-wāfi fī Te‘dāde-l Qawāfī which was written in the eighth century AH by the famous Persian poet, Mohammad Assar-e Tabrizi. Manuscripts of this work are kept in libraries in Iran and abroad that have not been introduced, reviewed and corrected. The following article is dedicated to introducing and analyzing the text of Al-wāfi fī Te‘dāde-l Qawāfī along with tables and diagrams; It has been done in a descriptive-analytical manner and with reference to library sources. Assar’s treatise includes an introduction and several chapters;  it dealt with rhyming topics such as letters, vowels, Ravi and defects of rhyme, as well as the meters of poetry. In the last chapter of the book, he has listed more than ten thousand words of two to seven letters in alphabetical and dictionary form. The results of this research, which have been obtained after correcting and comparing two manuscripts of the book, show that reviewing and publication of this valuable dictionary can be of great help to the research of both rhetoric and  rhyme. Also, considering that in this book, rhyming words have been grammatically analyzed in terms of suffixes and final syllables, it can be used by linguists and researchers of Persian grammar; it can also be used as an ancient dictionary of suffixes.