Hans Wehr (1909–1981)

The root-based system makes it very difficult for beginners to use, obviously. I would add that if you want to speak Arabic (and not just read it), you should be aware that this book will not offer you much help.

Because of the history of publishing and scholarship in the Arab world, there seem to be some Egypt-centric tendencies in the book as well.

I would only recommend this book to people who are studying Standard Arabic for purposes of scholarship, religious or historical study, or work in media. Unfortunately if you want to speak and converse in Arabic like an Arab, you may need any number of other dictionaries. As far as I know are published dictionaries in Egyptian, Yemeni, Gulf, Syrian and other dialects.

I would add that in many ways, this monstrous tome is merely a (partly) modernized abridgement of Lane’s lexicon, which gives many more variant forms, including vowel variants and epenthetic forms. Wehr has chosen some of these and, prescriptively, in favor of a more Egyptian understanding of Arabic, scrapped others. For instance, for “a fifth,” Lane has khums and khumus; Wehr keeps only the first form. For others, though, like ‘ear’, Wehr follows Lane in including both udhn and udhun. It seems that Wehr was following the lead of prescriptivist Arabs to help construct a coherent, sanitized Arabic.… (mehr)