Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic

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 Otto Harrassowitz in Wiesbaden, Germany, it was an enlarged and revised English version of Wehr's German Arabisches Wörterbuch für die Schriftsprache der Gegenwart ("Arabic dictionary for the contemporary written language") (1952) and its Supplement (1959). Writing in the 1960s, a critic comments, "Of all the dictionaries of modern written Arabic, the work [in question] ... is the best."

The work is compiled on descriptive principles: only words and expressions that are attested in context are included. "It was chiefly based on combing modern works of Arabic literature for lexical items, rather than culling them from medieval Arabic dictionaries, which was what Lane had done in the nineteenth century".

The dictionary arranges its entries according to the traditional Arabic root order. Foreign words are listed in straight alphabetical order by the letters of the word. 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.

Under a given root, lexical data are, whenever they exist, arranged in the following sequence:

Nominal forms then follow according to their length (including those verbal nouns and participles which merit separate listings). This ordering means that forms derived from the same verb stem (i.e. closely related finite verb forms, verbal nouns, and participles) are not always grouped together (as is done in some other Arabic dictionaries). The dictionary does not usually give concrete example forms of finite derived stem verbs, so that the user must refer to the introduction in order to know the pattern associated with each of the stem numbers ("II" through "X") and reconstruct such verb forms based solely on the stem number and the abstract consonantal root.

Transcriptions (for specific details, see Hans Wehr transliteration) are provided for the past tense of the basic verb form, for the vowel of the imperfect tense, and for all nouns and particles, but they are not provided for verb forms of the derived stems, except for any irregular forms, the rare XI to XV stems, and the quadriliteral roots. The morphology of the derived stems II-X is regular and is given in Wehr's "Introduction".

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