Product Description

Its scholarship, accuracy and reliability make it one of the most significant contributions to Arabic lexicography. It is hoped that this masterpiece will point the way ot wider use of modern lexicographical principles in the compilation of dictionaries for earlier periods of the Arabic language.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #11246 in Books
• Published on: 1993-05-01
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 1301 pages

Middle East Journal
There can be no doubt that...it is a basic tool for study of modern Arabic.

Bibliotheca Orientalis
The reliability and completeness of the work deserve every praise, as does the practical arrangement of the entries.

From the Inside Flap
This edition of the Dictionary, published eighteen years after its first appearance is an enlarged and improved version of it original corpus. During the past two decades, the Dictionary has achieved widespread acceptance and use. In the interim, modern written Arabic has continued to exhibit vigorous lexical growth. Therefore, feeling the need to fill in many gaps and update the corpus, the author again undertook systematic collection of material. In addition to many neologisms of recent origin, the author has incorporated much older material attested in present-day contexts, which had not yet appeared in the Dictionary, as well as numerous improvements and corrections. The result is this revised 4th edition has nearly 200 new pages.

All new entries have been derived from primary sources, i.e. from running contexts. The source texts, predominately from the last ten years, cover a broad spectrum of content, style and origin, thereby providing a representative cross section of modern usage encountered in various fields such as technology, economics, sports, medicine, the oil industry and the natural sciences, as well as creative literature. Particular use was made of texts from Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia which were drawn from newspapers, periodicals, textbooks, official and private documents and belles-lettres; some use was also made of the press of the northwest African countries. The number of new entries, including lemmata as well as compounds, idiomatic phrases and new definitions of head words, runs to approximately 13,000. Moreover, in about 3,000 instances, smaller additions (new transcriptions, plural forms, prepositional government of verbs, cross-references, etc.) have been inserted, errors corrected, obsolete entries eliminated. Some lemmata have been completely reworked.

Customer Reviews

The fundamental Arabic learning tool
I can't say anything more than what has already been said by the majority of the other reviewers. Great resource for students of Arabic once past the basics.

The standard for Arabic students
The Hans-Wehr is the standard for Arabic-English dictionaries. The comprehensive manner in which it explains the word forms provides you with a fantastic picture of meaning.

Although it is laid-out in word root order, once you get a handle on how to approach it, it's English-style layout makes searching for words simple and relatively quick. The layout (root order) also provides you with an insight into where common meanings are derived from a single idea (i.e. the word for United comes from the root which also gives you the word for the number 1). If this doesn't suit you, maybe you should also have a dictionary such as Al-Mawrid.

A word of advice to anyone looking at the Hans-Wehr: Read the introduction. If you don't, you probably won't know what's going on at all and I suspect this is the problem that some have had (and subsequently rated the dictionary poorly). From this book, you will get context, grammatical info and even a degree of pronunciation guide.

Good luck!

The problem of dictionary remains open also with this dict.
This well known dictionary received much praising from many reviewers. And there is no doubt that it is a very valuable scholarly study indeed. But it is highly demanding from the user and one must be very carefull not to fool himself that the ever-lasting problem of looking up to an Arabic word shall be solved fore once and all by this one. Far from it! It is even very hard to say that Hans-Weher dict is better and easier than other root-based ones in this respect. I believe that there are so many Arabic words that even a highly educated native speaker of Arabic would no be able to pin-point in this dictionary. I am rather inclined to say that ,with this dictionary, the infamous vicious-circle of root recognition is so much pronounced for so many entities, unless you are a master of the language and know already that difficult word very well. But ,then, why to look for it at all, if you are not an Arabic scholar with some special purpose?. I forward my strong warnings to those who are at some middle level of their Arabic adventure: Don't belive to the story that Arabic is a highly rule based language, so that it is trivial to recognize roots, plurals etc easily. Yes rules are there in Arabic and so many of them. But with as much exceptions as you would (not) like! Involved in Arabic since fairly a long time and able to recognize so many words from my own native language (Turkish) which have borrowed so heavily from this comprehensive one, I ,more often than not, am bwildered in deciding which one has the upper hand; exceptions or rules! Once more don't deceive yourself into believing that the regular three consonant-root pattern is ,by far, the dominant one as told by the grammar books. Even it might be so on sheer statistical basis, those with weak consonants and the more and more troublesome "hemzet" as well as the brooken plurals are by far the most frequent ones in actual usage.

Surely for any one seriously concerned with Arabic an alphabetically ordered dictionary such as Al Mawrid (if you know a better one please let me know) is inevitable. As for a root based one as Hans-Weher, I would rather recommend to those who know French, Larousse's bilingual dictionary, at least as a supplement.