Customer Reviews

Arabic-English-English-Arabic Standard Dictionary (Hippocrene Standard Dictionary)

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As a dictionary this may be useful to someone who already knows Arabic, but it will be difficult for a beginning or intermediate student of Arabic. Abreviations for parts of speech are given for English but not for Arabic. Going from English to Arabic, the exact sense of a word is not given so you can't really be certain what you might be saying. Pick an English word and you get two or three Arabic words. Look those up and (if you can find them) you get somewhat different English words. You won't find a single 'naughty bit' either.

Moreover, it is UK English (you can find a biscuit but you'll get no cookies here) which results in some curious word choices. For example, some English definitions for Arabic words are: "calumniator, feccundation, state of orphanage, eructation, reproach for benefit, jet d'eau, to drill child, aided conqueror, patch scrap, silk stuff, to spell award, etc." You may need another dictionary just to understand these definitions.

It is definitely not for a beginner and the intermediate student will need a fairly good grasp of Arabic.

The dictionary includes a wide selection of words a student is likely to use.The arabic-english part folows the standard arabic word order using the origin base of words, which is not given explicitly. Also the gender of nouns is not given and there is no guide or grammar in the beginning. I recommend it since it is the only bi-directional dictionary.

This is one of the worst English-Arabic dictionaries I've worked with. It's terribly out of date and lacking many common words. Moreover, it's organized by root, not alphabetically, which isn't terrible if you're familiar with Arabic word patterns, but since it does not bold the root verb entries or otherwise call out where each root section starts, it is incredibly difficult to look up words, even if you know what you are looking for.

If you're looking for concise explanations and helpful examples, please DON'T pick this dictionary!!! Extremely unorganized and un-helpful, there's even a "supplemental list" in the back of the book as if the authors suddenly wanted to throw in more words and didn't know where to put them in or something...

This is an old-style dictionary, organized according to roots rather than alphabetically. That's fine though. What's not fine is that it is missing soooooo many common current words. This dictionary is ancient. It's word list is WWI vintage. ...

please don't waste your time and money on this dictionary. it's not sufficient for any sort of serious use, and if someone is just using it to look up isolated words, a combination of hans wehr and google translate is just as effective.