Steingass, Francis Joseph. A Comprehensive Persian-English Dictionary, including the Arabic words and phrases to be met with in Persian literature. London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1892.
This is my favorite dictionary to use when reading classical Persian texts, and I think many Persianists feel similarly. Steingass included both a solid number of entries (just under 70,000) and, often, a great variety of definitions per entry. I usually find what I’m looking for—if not more than I bargained for.
The utility of Steingass’ Persian-English dictionary as an Arabic-English dictionary is also not to be underestimated. If you’re reading, e.g., classical Arabic poetry, you will encounter many words that are too old-fashioned to be covered in Hans Wehr’s dictionary, but which are included in Steingass’ Persian-focused work. (This is not meant as a criticism of Wehr, which is clearly targeted at MSA.) Could you consult Lane, Hava, etc. for archaic Arabic vocabulary? Of course, and you should; but in a pinch, Steingass is a surprisingly viable option.
A fairly high-resolution scan of the dictionary can be found at the Internet Archive. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to add a copy to your personal digital library.
Steingass has long been available also in an online, searchable version, thanks to the efforts of the Digital Dictionaries of South Asia project at the University of Chicago. Unfortunately, there are many, many problems with the encoding of Arabic-script text in their database, with the result that searching for words is error-prone and frustrating. (I may write about this in detail at some point, if I get a chance.)
Desiring a cleaner digital Steingass for my own use, I downloaded all 69,888 entries from the DDSA version, organized them in a SQLite database, and fixed what I could. For the Persian headwords in particular, I was able to enforce a significantly smaller character set. This should make it easier and more intuitive to find what you need. The SQLite database file itself can be downloaded from one of my GitHub repositories.
With the data in hand, it was only a matter of developing a basic frontend app to interface with it. (Well, there are other potentially interesting things that I’ve done with this project—e.g., calculating abjad values—but I don’t have time to get into it now. Maybe later.) This site is hosted via Cloudflare Pages; the frontend source code is available on GitHub.
I hope you find this new version of Steingass useful! And I must emphasize that the team at UChicago still deserves 99% of the credit. The last 1%, however, can make a real difference.
Theodore Beers, April 2024