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Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic

The Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic is an Arabic-English dictionary compiled by Hans Wehr and edited by J Milton Cowan.

First published in 1961 by Otto Harrassowitz in Wiesbaden, Germany, it was inspired by Wehr's German edition Arabisches Wörterbuch für die Schriftsprache der Gegenwart (1952) and its Supplement (1959). Writing in the 1960s, a critic comments, "Of all the dictionaries of modern written Arabic, the work [in question] ... is the best.

The work is compiled on descriptive principles: only words and expressions which are attested in context are included. "It was chiefly based on combing modern works of Arabic literature for lexical items, rather than culling them from medieval Arabic dictionaries, which was what Lane had done in the nineteenth century".

Collation

The dictionary arranges its entries according to the traditional Arabic root order. Foreign words are listed in straight alphabetical order by the letters of the word. Arabicized loanwords, if they can clearly fit under some root, are entered both ways, often with the root entry giving reference to the alphabetical listing.

Under a given root, lexical data are, whenever they exist, arranged in the following sequence:

the perfect of the basic stem (stem I)
vowels of the imperfect of stem I
maṣdars (verbal nouns) of stem I
finite derived stem verb forms, indicated by Roman numerals

Nominal forms then follow according to their length (including those verbal nouns and participles which merit separate listings). This ordering means that forms derived from the same verb stem (i.e. closely-related finite verb forms, verbal nouns, and participles) are not always grouped together (as is done in some other Arabic dictionaries). The dictionary does not usually give concrete example forms of finite derived stem verbs, so that the user must memorize the meaning of the stem numbers ("II" through "X") and reconstruct such verb forms based solely on the stem number and the abstract consonantal root.

Transcription and orthography

Transcriptions are not provided for the derived stems, except for:

any irregularities
the rare XI to XV stems
those of the quadriliteral roots

However, the morphology of the derived stems II-X are already shown in Wehr's "Introduction".

Foreign words are transliterated according to pronunciation, for which Arab students at the University of Münster have been consulted. This means that the sounds [e], [ē], [ə], [o], [ō], [g], [v] and [p], which are sometimes used in Modern Standard Arabic pronunciation, but cannot be easily represented in standard Arabic script (even with full vowel diacritics), can be unambiguously indicated.

As to orthography, word-initial glottal stops or hamza (i.e. the ا vs. أ vs. إ distinction) are not shown. Word-final yā ي and alif maqṣūra ى are also not distinguished (which is, incidentally, an Egyptian custom). The pronunciation transcriptions made it possible to work out when ي and ى should be written according to orthographic norms which distinguish the two (though not when word-initial hamza should be used).

Editions

The English version of the Hans Wehr dictionary is currently available in two editions. The so-called third printing from 1960 under the title A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic – Arabic-English, printed in Lebanon by Librarie du Liban since 1980, is widely available in the Middle East. (No ISBN is available.) The fourth edition (pictured above), considerably enlarged (1301 pages compared to 1110 in the third printing) and amended, was published in 1994 by Spoken Language Services, Inc. of Ithaca, NY. (ISBN 0-87950-003-4). There is a more recent German edition available (5th edition).

Notes

References