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: #5134 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

Good but...
Everything everyone has said about this dictionary is basically true, but let me give a slightly different take on it. I was a DLI student too, and I can confirm that this dictionary which is issued on arrival to Arabic students does enjoy an almost religious following. However, most teachers there who are native speakers but not trained linguists or teachers, will tell you that they really didn't learn the root system as students in their native countries and many of them have a hard time using this dictionary themselves. One such teacher helped us order copies of the Mawrid alphabetically-arranged dictionary which we ended up using more. I think the Mawrid is a better choice for starters. To me, the Hans-Wehr dictionary is more of a tool for linguists or serious students. As a teacher, I actually think students should stay away from dictionaries the first year or two because they end up being a distraction or a crutch. If you decide to buy this as your first and only dictionary, just be very aware of how it's organized, and be ready to learn how to identify roots.

Great Dictionary
Its the book recommended by my Arabic class, and for good reason. It is written in big type and has a huge vocabulary. It does not provide vowels, but it does give an english transliteration, which makes it easy to determine what the vowels are. Sorted by roots.

A must-have for Students of Arabic Language
This dictionary is an essential resource for any one trying to learn the Arabic Language. Be it the Modern form of the language or the Classical one, Has-Wehr covers everything one needs to understand a word's usage in the Arabic Language.