Arabic-English Dictionary: The Hans Wehr Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic [Paperback]

Hans Wehr (Author), J. Milton Cowan (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1, 1993 | ISBN-10: 0879500034 | ISBN-13: 978-0879500030 | Edition: 4th

"This Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic (fourth edition) has been enlarged and amended with 13,000 new entries. It is the only authorized paperback edition of the famous Hans Wehr Arabic-English Dictionary, edited by J. Milton Cowan. This new edition has thousands of new entries include numerous additions and corrections to the material and presents the results in a single handsome volume.

The author provides a useful introduction in which he discusses, clearly and precisely, the present state of the Arabic language. He points out the situations in which written and spoken varieties of Arabic are used, and remarks on the forces that influenced the development of the lexicon of Modern Arabic. He discusses both the purist movement with its normative tradition, and what might be called the laissez-faire actual usage of writers and journalists under the influence of Western modes of expression, of their everyday colloquial, or both. He then moves on to the problem of local terminology, especially for public institutions, offices, administrative matters, titles, and foods. Although such terms are included for most of the Arab countries, the list is not complete, as indeed the author recognizes (viii); readers of Arabic material characterized by a distinct regional coloring are advised to refer to dialect dictionaries and glossaries."

Editorial Reviews

Review

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

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

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.

Product Details

• Paperback: 1301 pages
• Publisher: Spoken Language Services; 4th edition (May 1, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0879500034
• ISBN-13: 978-0879500030
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 1.4 x 8.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (86 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #20,898 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #93 in Books > Education & Reference > Dictionaries & Thesauruses > Foreign Language Dictionaries & Thesauruses

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

242 of 245 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The only essential Arabic dictionary for English speakers April 28, 2004

By J. E. S. Leake

Format:Paperback

First, I must say this is the only Modern Written Arabic (MWA) - English dictionary that the student of Arabic has to have. Others, Al-Mawrid, for example, are useful as supplements, and contain new vocabulary, and there is a more recent German edition (5th edition) of Wehr published by Harrassowitz, but this book has a standard of scholarship unrivalled by any other MWA-English dictionary. Middle Eastern published MWA-English dictionaries like Mawrid, for example, don't give the grammatical information learners of Arabic need, such as broken plurals, verbal vowelling, verbal nouns (masdars), let alone how verbs are used with prepositions, all of which Wehr tells the user.

Words are in root order, so maktaba (desk) [mktbh] and kaatib (writer) [k'tb] both are found under the verb kataba (to write) [ktb]. This really is the most useful way of ordering Arabic dictionaries for someone who's mastered the basics of Arabic grammar, though an alphabetic order dictionary is a help when you're starting and occasionally even when you're expert.

This dictionary is NOT a dictionary of Classical Arabic (although Beeston in his anthology of Bassar bin Burd reckoned that Wehr covered the vast majority of the vocabulary of this poet of the 8th Century AD). For Classical Arabic, Lane (perhaps supplemented by Hava's much more affordable al-Fara'id) is essential. But Lane is useless for modern Arabic. And if you're reading mediaeval Arabic, you will find Wehr fills in some of the gaps in Lane.

This dictionary is NOT a dialect dictionary, though it contains many dialect words that have found their way into the written Arabic of Egypt, Iraq, etc.... Arabs don't write colloquial Arabic (at least not in formal contexts) and dialect dictionaries are specialized (colloquial Arabic-English dictionaries are usually written in a phonetic transcription rather than in the Arabic script). If you need a dialect dictionary, get one. This isn't one.

Other reviewers have rightly commented on the size of this dictionary, but some have confused editions. The 3rd (SLS paperback) edition was 114 x 162 x 45mm (4.5" x 6.4" x 1.75") in size, weighed 0.65 kg and had tiny 5.5 pt print. The 4th (SLS paperback) edition is larger: 216 x 130 x 40mm (5.2" x 8.5" x 1.5"), weighs 0.8 kg and has 7.5 pt print. This makes the SLS 4th edition's print much more readable than the SLS 3rd edition's.

The 4th edition, which is sewn-bound, is also more robust than the 3rd edition, which was perfect-bound - I'm on my 3rd copy of the 3rd edition while my 4th edition soldiers on after 8 years. However, the book is not really pocket sized any more (I still keep using my last copy of the 3rd edition as a pocket copy).

The 4th edition isn't cheap (it costs much more in England than in the US, though). If you're in the Middle East, you can pick up Librarie du Liban hardback copies of the 3rd edition (it has larger print than either of the two paperbacks - about 8 pt, the size of the original Brill 3rd edition - and is very clear) for a little less. There's also a hardback reprint of the pocket-sized 3rd edition available in the UK, which has rather unclear script. It's a straight copy of the SLS 3rd edition, and is Indian. It's usable, but is the least satisfactory version yet. But I'd advise students to get the SLS 4th edition if they can afford it. If you've lots of money, perhaps get the Harrassowitz hardback - I've not done so. And if you've money and German, get the 5th Harrassowitz edition (Arabisches Wörterbuch für die Schriftsprache der Gegenwart).

[I have now bought the 4th Harassowitz English edition. The text is slightly crisper and half a point to a point larger, about 8 pt. The paper is less over-bleached, which makes it a bit easier on the eyes too. J.L.] Read more ›

146 of 151 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars This is THE Arabic- English Dictionary - Malik Al-Quamees October 26, 2006

By Charles Curtis

Format:Paperback

I am a former Army Arabic linguist, and a graduate of DLI/FLC Monterey. This dictionary is the primary one we used, both at DLI and later on the job. An old Army buddy, I have a deep abiding affection for this thing, it being a true linguistic masterpiece and longtime companion.

Hans Wehr was professor at University of Munster from the fifties thru the seventies. This dictionary was first published in 1952 in German as "Arabisches Worterbuch fur die Schriftsprache der Gegenwart" - a mouthful of a title if there ever was one. We just called it the Hans Wehr. To my knowledge, it is the only dictionary that's organized to properly exploit Arabic morphology, which is to say the consonal root system.

Any other approach makes a hash out of the Arab language. Straightforward alphabetical ordering is ill suited to Arabic. The only traditionally alphabetically organized Arabic dictionary that I've seen (and I've seen quite a few) which is any good at all is the Lebanese Al-Mawrid. But I use it only as an occasional adjunct to Hans. Once you get a hang of Hans, and your vocabulary and sense of Arabic grows, the Mawrid will only be very occasionally useful from Arabic to English. It may not seem possible to a beginner (it certainly didn't to me,) but the Hans Wehr will come to make much more sense, and become much more accessible, than any other Arabic to English dictionary. So if you are new to this game, suck it up and use Hans as much as possible.

One sole caveat: for Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) the Hans Wehr is incomprable & indespensible. MSA is the modern universally written form of Arabic, and the pan-national lingua franca spoken in formal settings- on TV, in courts, etc., by educated Arabs.... Note, though, that the local dialectical and classical forms of Arabic are very different balls of wax, and with them this dictionary can be of only limited application. I found it pretty wanting when dealing with Egyptian dialect while in Cairo, for example. For the Gulf, Jordan, Palestine and rest of the Levant it's a little more useful.

A brief grammatical explanation as to why the Hans is the only game in town (sorry if this is redundant or too didactic, but everyone should know what the deal is:)

As others have said here, the majority of the words in Arabic are derived from a three (usually) consonant verbal root. You take the consonants - e.g., KTB which denotes writing, or 'KH'RJ denotes outward movement - and vowel them with fatahs, or short 'a' sounds (which like all short vowel sounds are unrepresented in everyday writing) and you get KaTaBa, which basically means "he wrote" or KHaRaJa which means "he went out" - both the 3rd person masculine past perfect. This is used as the essential base form of the verb, equivalent to the infinitive in an Indo-European language.

By changing the unwritten "short vowels" (re-vowelling) and by adding other written "long vowel" and consonal sounds, you can generate a slew of words related to the verb in question. For example, by adding an M (mim) to the KTB (MaKTaB) you get "office." An A (alif)(AKTuB) gives you "I write." MaKTaBA = library. KiTAB = book. KHaRUJ = exit. KHRAJ = tax. KHiREEJ= graduate MaKHRaJ = place of exit. You get the idea.

Yet it gets crazier, and more beautiful, still.

By voweling this consonal root in different ways, and by adding other consonants as prefixes or suffixes, you place the verb in different measures. Now this is critical: measures are different forms the verb takes to change its meaning. They are one of the main reasons Arabic is such a zany, beautiful (some would say opaquely impenetrable) labyrinth of meaning. There are (I believe) 26 different measures in Classical Arabic. Just thank Allah that the modern Arabs have cut that number down to 10 in Modern Standard. Ten is wild enough. They are explained in the introduction of the Hans Wehr pp. xii - xv. Read these pages. They help explain the signifigance of all the roman numeralled entries in the dictionary.

All of the above means, of course, that an straight, western style alphabetical dictionary is nearly incoherent in Arabic. The fact that verbs all have all the same classes of prefixes, and the same patterns of internal suffixes & suffixes, not to mention complex patterns of conjugation in all the measures & moods, means that you have potentially hundreds of words for each of dozens of prefixes and patterns. And the voweling issue clouds things even further. That's not even to mention further insanity such as irregular nominal plurals, cases (nunation!) & other nominal suffixes (NB: beware verbal nouns.) Our Germanic/Latinate linear methodologies just don't apply very neatly. Better to approach the system as it's organized: radically.

Better to go from the heart from which all the meaning radiates, the root system, and classify words thereby. The roots are all listed alphabetically, but their relatives are all listed under them. Thus nouns like MaKTaB, MaKTaBA, KiTAB, and even more complex permutations such as AKTiTAB (registration) or ASTiKTAB (dictation), etc. will all be found under KTB on pp. 951 & 952 of Hans. Irregular plurals are of course listed under their singular form.

The nouns are just the appetizer, though.

The real piece de resistance are the aforementioned roman numeralled enteries of the main root entery. These give you the meanings of the measures. Not every verb is put into every measure- some are only in practice used in one or two. KTB is used in the I, II, III, IV, VI, VII, VIII, & Xth measures. Referring to the introduction pp. xii-xv, you see that PP 3rd masc. sing. measure I is KaTaBa, to write. KAaTBa is measure III, which means to correspond. VI, TaKATBa also means to correspond (get used to redundancy in Arabic, as well as *ahem* apparent contradiction.. You will learn to savour repetition & ambiguity!) Measure X, ASTaKTaBa means to dictate..

And so forth.

Abberations, cognates and foreign words - which ironically will probably throw you for a loop quicker than native Arab ones will - are listed in straight alphabetical fashion among the roots.

You have to begin to learn the morphology, learn to i.d. roots in your sleep, and internalize the patterns. Then pick up the Hans Wehr and let the fun begin!

At DLI one of our profs has created a "Conjugations of the Ten Measures" verb chart which is requisite to fully & easily utilizing this dictionary, especially for beginning and intermediate students. It apparently exists in no other place. I don't know why there isn't one in the Hans, seeing as how all those nutty German positivists have seemingly considered & fully classified nearly everything else. Try googling it, maybe you can dig it up online. Or else try to run a DLI Arabic alum down, and get a copy off him or her. If all else fails, you can perhaps construct a similar chart using the Hans (again, pp. xii - xv) and a good grammar book. I have my chart sealed to the back of my dictionary for easy reference.

This dictionary strips the patterns of the Arab language bare. This incredible semantic superstructure is one even many native speaking Arabs are mostly unaware of. Still, sometimes - okay, maybe often - this dictionary (like scientific things can so often do) kills the puppy, dissects it, and gives you a chart. But the essence of that puppy isn't in the chart. It's a more metaphysical reality. A living, breathing, wriggling thing, one that requires much more intuition than logic to understand.. The Arab language is just such a reality. Another semantic universe, truly exotic to an English speaking mind, a vivid poetic wonder.

You know, studying Arabic is a real pleasure. It's truly sublime.

Anyway, this is the dictionary you must own if you are in any way serious about Arabic. Using it can be a both exhilarating (no joke) yet exasperating and loopy experience, given how it represents the culmination of centuries of Orientalist scholarship.. Which means it is both a huge triumph, yet somehow simultaneously a subtle subterranean disaster. The Teutonic mania for clinical order and classification creasing into the envelopping cyclically anarchic mystery of the Semitic mind... Or something like that.

In any case, it is a masterpiece, which is good seeing as how it's apparently nearly all we've got.

[ 6/13/2013: Today I finally got around to doing what I should have done when I first wrote this, and have scanned the chart of the ten measures. I've posted it online at tenmeasures point blogspot point com for your collective enlightenment and benefit. Apologies for not getting around to it much sooner. Good luck, happy studies everyone. ] Read more ›

57 of 63 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars This is simply indispensable...the best! October 2, 2000

By L. Feld

Format:Paperback

The Hans Wehr Arabic-English dictionary is simply the best...and totally indispensable. I don't know how you cold get by learning Arabic without it! I studied Arabic for several years, and got more use out of this dictionary than out of any other reference source BY FAR. If you don't believe me, I wish I could show you a picture of my dictionary now -- it's been used so much it's in pieces (obviously, I need to go out and buy a new one!). The most difficult thing (which can get frustrating, but like a puzzle, once you unlock the secret, everything starts clicking into place) is you've got to know the root of a word in order to find it in here. But that's the challenge -- and beauty -- of Arabic, possibly the world's richest, most poetic, amazing language; once you know the root a whole world of rich variations on the basic root meaning (i.e. DRS=study; mudarris=teacher, or one who MAKES you study!) starts to open up. No matter what level of Arabic you're at, you need this dictionary!

51 of 57 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars DO NOT BUY THIS VERSION - GET THE BIGGER ONE. February 8, 2004

By Steps Ahead Fan

Format:Paperback

I had to buy this book twice, the second time I bought the normal sized version (which is about 6" x 9"). This particular version being reviewed here is just TOO small and you will need to invest in a magnifying glass just to attempt to read the script - and then you'll not be able to anyway because the ink is too thick. You are better off not getting this version in the first place and buying the larger version - believe me you will not regret that decision. BTW, I have totally normal vision, no glasses, no sight problems (in case you are wondering !!!)