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Hans Wehr's Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic, English-language U.S. edition.

The Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic is an Arabic-English dictionary compiled by Hans Wehr and edited by J Milton Cowan. First published in 1961 by publishers Otto Harrassowitz in Wiesbaden, Germany, it was inspired by Wehr's German edition Arabisches Wörterbuch für die Schriftsprache der Gegenwart (1952). Writing in the 1960s, a critic comments, "Of all the dictionaries of modern written Arabic, the work [in question] ... is the best."^[1]

The dictionary arranges its entries according to the traditional Arabic root order. Foreign words are listed in straight alphabetical order by first letter (in the Arabic script). Arabicized loanwords, if they can clearly fit under some root, are entered both ways, often with the root entry giving reference to the alphabetical listing.^[2]

The work is compiled on descriptive principles: only words and expressions which are attested in context are included. Most entries are first given in unvowelled Arabic script, followed by a full transliteration. Most of the necessary grammatical information is given for each entry, including plurals, the stem vowel of the imperfect verb, and the different verbal nouns along with their specific meanings where they exist.^[3]

Some features which could be considered drawbacks include the complete lack of indication of word-initial glottal stops or hamza (i.e. the ا vs. أ vs. إ distinction), and the similar ignoring of the distinction between word-final yā ي vs. alif maqṣūra ى (a feature adapted from Egyptian custom) in the work. It also generally fails to give any concrete example forms of finite derived stem verbs, so that the user must memorize the meaning of the stem numbers ("II" through "X") and reconstruct such verb forms based solely on the stem number and the root; and within the dictionary entry for a root, participles and maṣdars (verbal nouns) are listed apart from finite verbs derived from the same stem, leaving it up to the user to make connections between closely-related forms. However, every word in the dictionary is transliterated, which is useful for indicating sounds which are sometimes used in Modern Standard Arabic pronunciation, but that cannot be easily represented in standard Arabic script (even with full vowel diacritics), such as [e], [o], [g], and [v]. The presence of these Latin-alphabet transcriptions makes it possible to work out when alif maqṣūra should be used and when word-final yā in the written orthography (though not when word-initial hamza should be used).

The English version of the Hans Wehr dictionary is currently available in two editions. The so-called third printing from 1960 under the title A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic – Arabic-English, printed in Lebanon by Librarie du Liban since 1980, is widely available in the Middle East. (No ISBN is available.) The fourth edition (pictured above), considerably enlarged (1301 pages compared to 1110 in the third printing) and amended, was published in 1994 by Spoken Language Services, Inc. of Ithaca, NY. (ISBN 0-87950-003-4)

• Sa'id, Majed F. (1962). "Review of A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic by Hans Wehr, J Milton Cowan". Language 38 (3): 328-330. (Available online through JSTOR)

• Classical Arabic
• Academy of the Arabic Language
• Arabic English Lexicon