A Frequency Dictionary of Persian; A Work that Needs to Be Edited or Rewritten?

From the series of “Routledge Frequency Dictionaries”, up to the present time, 15 titles have been published in a total number of 14 languages. The series, published by Routledge Publications (Taylor & Francis Group, London & New York), has gained worldwide fame, especially among those who do research in the certain field(s) of ‘word frequencies’ and/or ‘corpus linguistics’. Each of the monographs in the series has been compiled in the form of a frequency dictionary and commonly based on independent linguistic corpus/ corpora. Most dictionaries have 5,000 main entries/ lemmata each, and the bulk of the text of each book is the list of these words – in order of frequency, from the most frequent to the least frequent words. The basis of word arrangement is not basically the raw or absolute frequency, but the index of dispersion of each word was also considered. Immediately after the frequency list, there is an alphabetical list of words – in alphabetical order of the main language of each dictionary. Thematic vocabulary lists (in independent boxes and amongst the pages of the main part of the book, i.e. the Frequency index), and then “Alphabetical index” and “Part of speech index” come respectively at the end of the book. Here is a review of A Frequency Dictionary of Persian (2017, 2nd impression: 2018), one of the monographs of the series.In this article we have shown that this dictionary, despite its relatively positive points, has many serious methodological problems and, in this respect, it does not meet the expectations of researchers and experts of the field.