This article deals with two main issues: firstly, it investigates the status of Sanai's poetry in the development of Dehkhoda Dictionary. To achieve this end, examples cited from Sanai's poems by the authors of Dehkhoda Dictionary have been examined. The study reveals that in quite a good number of cases, Sanai's poems have been the exclusive source for the borrowed examples and the dictionary has heavily relied on them. This includes formal lexical items as well as the words belonging to the poet’s “imaginary geography” which seem to have been uniquely coined. Furthermore, some of Sanai's poems in Dehkhoda Dictionary were among the first established and documented evidential examples. Since the authors of Dehkhoda Dictionary observed a chronological order in recording the examples, it further delineates the status of Sanai's poetry in the development of the dictionary. The rest of the examples from Sanai have the same importance in terms of quantity and quality. The second focus of this article is a comparison between the original version of evidential examples in Dehkhoda Dictionary and a newly discovered manuscript of Hadiqa which was not available to the previous revisers of Sanai’s work or the authors of Dehkhoda Dictionary. This comparison has revealed how essential it is to revise the evidential examples in Dehkhoda Dictionary based on the newly published versions.
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