Introduction

Lisan al-'Arab (The Tongue of the Arabs) is the most comprehensive dictionary of classical Arabic ever compiled. Its author, Jamal al-Din Muhammad ibn Mukarram ibn Manzur al-Ifriqi al-Misri (630–711 AH / 1232–1311 CE), was an Egyptian jurist, literary scholar, and lexicographer of North African origin who served as a senior official in the Mamluk chancery. Ibn Manzur began compiling Lisan al-'Arab in 689 AH and completed it around 699 AH, working through the material at an extraordinary pace he himself attributed to divine facilitation. He stated in his introduction that he undertook the work as a service to the Arabic language and as a means of preserving the heritage of the classical Arab poets and scholars whose works were already becoming difficult for his contemporaries to access.

The dictionary contains approximately eighty thousand root entries organized according to the last letter of the root — a system borrowed from the earlier lexicographer al-Jawhari in his influential Al-Sihah. Under each root, Ibn Manzur assembles citations from pre-Islamic and early Islamic poetry, Quranic verses, prophetic hadiths, and the prose of the early Arabs, drawing extensively from the major earlier dictionaries: Al-Sihah by al-Jawhari, Tahdhib al-Lughah by al-Azhari, Al-Muhkam by Ibn Sidah, Al-Nihayah fi Gharib al-Hadith by Ibn al-Athir, and the works of Ibn Barri and others. Lisan al-'Arab is therefore not merely a dictionary but an encyclopedic anthology of classical Arabic usage, preserving thousands of lines of Arabic poetry and prose that would otherwise have been accessible only in scattered manuscripts.

The importance of Lisan al-'Arab for Islamic scholarship cannot be overstated. Every science of the Islamic tradition that depends on linguistic precision — Quranic exegesis (tafsir), hadith commentary (sharh), Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh), and theology (kalam) — requires access to the range of meanings a given Arabic word carried in classical usage. When scholars debate the interpretation of a Quranic term or the precise meaning of a prophetic expression, Lisan al-'Arab is the primary lexical reference that documents how that word was used across early Arabic literature. Its entries frequently resolve ambiguities in Quranic tafsir that shorter dictionaries leave open.

The work runs to fifteen large volumes in the standard modern edition (Dar Sadir, Beirut) and covers Arabic roots from alif to ya, organized by rhyme-letter (qafiyah) within each alphabetical section. Navigating it requires familiarity with Arabic root structure — a reader must identify the trilateral or quadrilateral root of a word before locating its entry. The entries themselves are detailed and often lengthy, proceeding from the core meaning of the root to its derived forms, figurative uses, and technical applications in different fields. Extensive poetic quotations give each entry the texture of a literary anthology as much as a dictionary.

For scholars of Ahl us-Sunnah engaged in Quranic or hadith studies, Lisan al-'Arab represents an indispensable reference that no serious library should lack. Modern students of Islamic knowledge are advised to develop facility with Arabic root structure before attempting to use it independently, and to consult it alongside other lexical works such as Al-Qamus al-Muhit by al-Fayruzabadi and Mukhtar al-Sihah by al-Razi for a complete picture of classical Arabic usage. In the contemporary era, Lisan al-'Arab has been digitized and indexed, making it searchable in ways its compiler could not have imagined — a development that has made this seven-hundred-year-old monument more accessible than ever.