Lisan al-‘Arab

Also known as The Tongue of the Arabs

Ibn Manẓūr took the five most important Arabic dictionaries and made them one.

He says in the preface what he is doing and why: the language is being corrupted, the great lexica are scattered and each is incomplete, and no scholar can consult all five. So he merged them, kept the attributions, and produced the record.

It was barely used in his lifetime and for centuries afterwards. It became the standard Arabic dictionary only when it was printed in Cairo in the 1880s, six hundred years after it was written.

Compiled by: Ibn Manẓūr
Kind: Dictionary
Date: 1290
Look things up: Alphabetical
Arrangement: By the LAST letter of the root, then the first - the rhyme order
Made by: One compiler
Published in: Cairo
Language: Arabic
Extent: 20 volumes; roughly 80,000 root entries
Form: Manuscript codices; printed from 1883
Latest edition: Bulaq edition 1883-91; Beirut editions in 15 to 20 volumes
Original title: لسان العرب

A specimen

The five sources he merged, and he names them: al-Azharī's Tahdhīb al-Lugha · Ibn Sīda's al-Muḥkam · al-Jawharī's Ṣiḥāḥ · Ibn Barrī's corrections to it · Ibn al-Athīr's Nihāya.
Where they agree he gives the common account. Where they differ he prints both and says which came from where. The reader is not asked to take his word for anything.

Lisan al-'Arab, prefatory statement of sources. Public domain.

The problem it solved

Arabic lexicography had been running for five centuries and had produced a shelf of great books that nobody could use together.

Each of the major dictionaries was excellent and partial. Al-Azhari's Tahdhib was strong on rare and archaic vocabulary. Ibn Sida's Muhkam was comprehensive on morphology. Al-Jawhari's Sihah was the most usable and the most widely owned, and was also known to contain errors, which Ibn Barri had catalogued in a separate work that had to be consulted alongside it. Ibn al-Athir's Nihaya covered the vocabulary of hadith specifically.

A scholar who wanted a reliable answer therefore needed five books, in different arrangements, held in different libraries, and the skill to reconcile them when they disagreed. That was possible for a handful of men in a handful of cities. For everyone else the tradition's accumulated knowledge was effectively inaccessible.

Ibn Manzur's stated motive was preservation. He believed the language was decaying - that people were speaking a corrupted Arabic and that the classical vocabulary was slipping away with the generation that still knew it. Whether or not that diagnosis was right, it produced the correct instinct: gather everything now, while the books still exist and men still know how to read them.

There was also a straightforward physical problem. Manuscripts wear out and libraries burn, and five separate works have five separate chances of being lost.

The five works were also in different arrangements. Al-Jawhari filed by the last root letter, al-Azhari by phonetic order in the tradition of al-Khalil, and Ibn Sida by semantic category. A scholar moving between them had to hold three incompatible search procedures in his head, and a word found instantly in one might take an hour in another.

And the tradition had no mechanism for consolidation. Each new dictionary was a fresh act of authorship competing with its predecessors rather than superseding them, so the shelf grew longer without ever getting easier to use.

Cairo in the 1280s was also absorbing scholars displaced from the east by the Mongol destruction, which concentrated books and expertise in one city and made a project of this kind briefly possible there and almost nowhere else.

The work itself

He merged the five and kept the seams visible.

Twenty volumes, some eighty thousand roots. Under each root the material from all the sources is gathered - definitions, derived forms, the shades of meaning, the poetry and hadith cited as evidence - and where his sources disagree he reports the disagreement and names who held which view. He adds very little of his own and says so plainly.

The arrangement is the rhyme order inherited from al-Jawhari: roots are filed by their LAST letter first, then by the first. To a modern reader this is perverse, and it exists because the primary users were poets who needed rhymes. Ibn Manzur kept it because his largest source used it and because changing the order would have meant re-sorting eighty thousand entries by hand.

The evidence base is what gives the book its weight. Every sense is supported by quotation - pre-Islamic poetry above all, plus Qur'anic usage, hadith and proverb - so the dictionary is simultaneously a lexicon and an anthology of the material the lexicon rests on. A reader can see why a word is said to mean what it is said to mean.

He is also careful about what he does not know. Where a word's meaning is disputed among the authorities and none is decisive, he leaves it disputed rather than choosing, which is why the book remains usable as evidence rather than merely as a verdict.

He also had to decide what to do when a source was simply wrong, and his answer is consistent: print it, attribute it, and print the correction beside it. Ibn Barri's catalogue of al-Jawhari's errors is absorbed into the entries rather than kept separate, so the reader gets the mistake and its refutation in one place.

The rhyme order is worth defending on one count: it groups words that end alike, which for a language built on triliteral roots means it groups by morphological pattern as well as by sound, so a reader browsing a section sees families of related formations together.

The poetry he quotes is doing double work as well. It supports the definitions and it preserves verse that survives nowhere else, so the dictionary is incidentally one of the larger anthologies of pre-Islamic poetry in existence.

What followed

Almost nothing for six hundred years, and then everything.

The Lisan circulated little in its own time. It is enormous, expensive to copy, and it arrived when al-Firuzabadi's much shorter Qamus - the next entry in this section - was about to give readers a comprehensive dictionary they could actually own. Convenience beat completeness, as it usually does.

Its rediscovery came with printing. The Bulaq edition of the 1880s put it in front of a scholarly world that now had different needs, and it became at once the standard reference for classical Arabic. It remains so. Every serious Arabic dictionary since, and every European dictionary of classical Arabic, is built on it or against it.

Its value now rests on precisely the feature that made it unwieldy then. Because Ibn Manzur merged rather than selected, and named his sources, the Lisan preserves the content of works that survive incompletely or not at all - and lets scholars reconstruct what each of the five said. A shorter book would have been used sooner and preserved less.

That trade recurs throughout this section. The compiler who condenses gets read; the compiler who gathers gets consulted, eventually, by people with a question he never anticipated. Ibn Manzur thought he was saving a language from decay. What he actually saved was the evidence for it.

Its own preservation was closer-run than its later status suggests. Few manuscripts survive, and the nineteenth-century Bulaq editors were working from a small number of copies of uncertain quality - so the standard text of classical Arabic rests on a slender transmission.

It is also the book that made a modern historical dictionary of Arabic conceivable. The Arabic Language Academies' projects of the twentieth century take it as the base text, in the way that European historical lexicography takes its national dictionaries - a six-hundred-year-old compilation functioning as the starting corpus.

Its six centuries of neglect are also a caution against reading influence backwards. A book that is now indispensable was, on the evidence, barely consulted for most of its life, and its current authority tells you about nineteenth-century printing rather than about thirteenth-century scholarship.