English is known by many linguists for its almost-unparalleled proclivity to accept loan words from other languages, most notably French, Latin and Greek. However, other languages, such as Persian, have also contributed to the lexical richness of this language. Loan words from a particular origin have been found to correlate with special cultural, sociological and historical variables and can thus become more or less prevalent in certain registers or at various periods of time. The aim of this study is to make use of the largest existing corpus of the English language, the corpus of contemporary American English (COCA), to investigate the most common English words that have been borrowed from Persian. For this purpose, a list is made of words specified by the Merriam Webster’s collegiate dictionary to be of Persian etymological origin. These words are then searched for in the COCA, and are subsequently identified and ranked both according to their frequency in five different registers (academic writing, fiction, magazine, newspapers and spoken discourse) and across three time periods (e.g., 90s, 00s and 10s). The findings of this corpus-based study can provide a more accurate description of the role that words of Persian origin play in the English language, and can inform studies that are carried out by linguists, sociologists and scholars of both Persian and English literature.

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