What is in this build
Every root of Lane's Arabic-English Lexicon that the Qur'ānic corpus attests — 1,604 of 1,651 roots in the corpus, which is all 1,604 that Lane has an article for.
Qur'ānic occurrences are spread across 2,885 entries; the traditions across 781 roots. Poetry and Arabic are reproduced exactly as Lane's text has them.
1 · What this is
Lane's Lexicon is the fullest Arabic-English dictionary there is, and one of the hardest to read: a 19th-century work printed in dense columns, written in the English of its day, and packed with abbreviations for the Arabic authorities behind every statement.
This tool republishes it, root by root, in a form you can actually read — the same content, restructured. Nothing is summarised away and nothing is added. Every entry keeps a Show Lane's original text toggle, so you can always see the source of what you are reading.
The one thing to understand first. Everything on a page is Lane's, restructured for reading — except the Core sense line, which is written by this tool and is labelled generated wherever it appears. If it is not marked generated, it came from Lane.
2 · The anatomy of an entry
A root page holds every article Lane records under that root: the mujarrad (the simple verb), each mazeed fehi form he attests, and the derived nouns. One entry is one of Lane's articles — this tool never merges two of his articles or splits one.
Core sense — he informed him of it; he put a mark on it generated
| Part | What it is |
|---|---|
| The form number Form 4 |
Which of the ten derived verb forms this article is. Always Western digits — Form 4, never Form IV. Noun entries have no form number and are labelled Noun. |
| The headword أَعْلَمَ |
The word as Lane vowels it. It is his vowelling, reproduced exactly. |
| The morphology bar | For a verb: the muḍāriʿ vowel on the ʿayn with its wazn, and the maṣdar — both from Lane's own entry. Blank where he does not give one, never filled in by guesswork. |
| The Core sense line | The one line written by this tool. See section 4. |
| A sense number 4.1.2 |
Lane's own numbering, not this tool's — see below. |
| A gloss line | The main line of a sense: a meaning in English, then the Arabic it belongs to. See section 3. |
| A note indented, smaller |
Lane's remark about a gloss, sitting directly under the gloss it comments on. |
What the sense numbers mean
They are Lane's divisions, reproduced. Where he enumerates senses beneath a broader one, you get two levels — 1.1, then 1.1.1 and 1.1.2 beneath it, then 1.2 for the next top-level division. A verb entry's top level is typically a different vowelling of the same root letters.
This build has 33,159 top-level senses and 26,989 subordinate ones. Runs get long: ضرب's Form 1 carries dozens of senses beneath a single division, which is why they are numbered rather than lettered — a b/c/d scheme runs out of alphabet well before the end of that one article.
A number never means importance or frequency. It is only Lane's position. Sense 1.1 is where he happened to start, not the commonest meaning.
3 · Inside a sense — glosses and notes
Lane writes a sense as continuous prose: the expression, its meaning, who it is said of, an authority's opinion and a cross-reference all run together in one paragraph. Each sense is decomposed into glosses and notes so it can be scanned instead of parsed.
| Part | What goes there |
|---|---|
| A gloss line meaning — عَلَّمَهُ |
One Arabic expression paired with its short meaning, English first — usually four to twelve words. This is the unit to scan. A sense with several expressions gets several lines. |
| A note | Everything that comments on a gloss rather than being one: who or what it is said of, an alternative reading, a restriction, a grammatical remark, an authority Lane names, a proverb label, a cross-reference to another article, a Qur'ān reference. |
The test is simply whether the fragment glosses an Arabic expression, or comments on one.
Is a gloss a definition or a usage?
Either, and the Arabic tells you which. If the Arabic is a bare word, the gloss defines it. If the Arabic is a phrase or a whole clause, the gloss translates that phrase in use — it is showing you how the word behaves, not defining it again.
Lane is not defining ضرب again; he is showing the idiom it forms.
Where a note begins, and what it holds
A note begins where Lane stops glossing and starts commenting. It is placed under the gloss it belongs to — not collected at the end of the sense — because that is where Lane put it: he writes each remark straight after the phrase it concerns.
note: That is, بِسَوْطٍ [with a whip], or ضَرْبَةَ سَوْطٍ [a stroke of a whip].
[then smite the necks] — فَضَرْبَ الرِّقَابِ
note: In the Qur'ān 47:4; originally فَٱضْرِبُوا الرِّقَابَ ضَرْبًا, the maṣdar standing here in place of its verb.
Where nothing in Lane's text ties a remark to one particular gloss, it is shown against the sense as a whole and marked on this sense rather than guessed at. 856 notes carry that mark.
Many senses have no gloss line at all, and that is not an omission. A large share of Lane's senses are pure grammatical or lexicographic discussion with no expression to gloss; those are shown entirely as notes. Nothing is ever invented to fill the gap.
Lane's densest sense in this build — ضرب 1.1 — runs to a full column of prose. It comes out as 10 gloss lines and 8 notes, with nothing dropped.
4 · The Core sense line
The one thing on the page this tool writes. It answers "what is this entry mainly about?" in a line, so you can scan a root of forty entries and find the one you want.
It is drawn only from the senses inside that entry — never from a related entry, the root's other forms, or anything outside Lane. Where he gives a word for the meaning, his word is used.
- It is a centre of gravity, not an inventory
- It carries up to about three distinct meanings. Different shades of one meaning count as one: a mark, a sign, a token is a single meaning said three ways, while he worshipped God; he became a slave; he was angry is three.
- What gets in, when there is competition
- First, closeness to the entry's core meaning; then, and only as a tie-break, how early Lane places it. Length is not a criterion at all — a meaning is not preferred for filling more of the page.
- A marginal sense stays out
- Deliberately. If the line does not mention something, read the senses; it was never meant to replace them.
- Nothing in it is inferred
- Where Lane is vague, the line stays vague.
If you are checking a claim, read the sense — not the Core line. It is a finding aid. The senses beneath it, and the verbatim text behind them, are the evidence.
5 · Literal and figurative — and what majāz means
A word used for the thing it was coined to name is being used literally. A word carried across to something else, because of a resemblance or a connection between them, is being used figuratively — as when English calls a dependable person "a rock". He is not a rock; the word has travelled from its original object to a new one on the strength of a likeness.
Arabic grammarians call this majāz (مجاز), from a root meaning to pass over, to cross — the meaning passes over from where it started to somewhere new. Its opposite is ḥaqīqa (حقيقة), a word in its literal sense.
The distinction matters for Qur'ān and hadith study because it changes what a passage claims. Reading a figurative usage literally, or a literal one figuratively, is the beginning of most misreadings. Lane records the classification wherever his sources give it.
A worked example, from علم. Lane records that عَلَمٌ — a word whose plain meaning is a mountain, or a banner — is also used for the chief of a people. A chief is neither a mountain nor a flag. The word has been carried across to him because he stands out and is looked to, exactly as a mountain or a raised banner does.
| Mark | Meaning |
|---|---|
| figurative · مجاز | Lane's sources classed this sense as figurative, and he reports it — he wrote "(tropical:)". 5,126 senses in this build. |
| figurative · مجاز — inferred | Lane concluded it himself. He wrote "(assumed tropical:)" where his sources did not say
so. A weaker claim, kept visibly distinct rather than flattened into the one above, so you can weigh
it differently.
example — ضرب, sense 1.1.2
"He beat, or disciplined, or trained, his dog for the purpose of the chase" — Lane judges the usage
figurative on his own authority.
4,753 senses in this build. |
6 · Other marks and colours
| What you see | What it means |
|---|---|
| generated | This line was written by the tool, not by Lane. It appears on the Core sense line and nowhere else. |
| Arabic in red | Lane attributes this Arabic to a tradition — a ḥadīth. It marks the text he quotes, not
his discussion of it. It does not say which tradition: he gives a collection, book or number
for none of his hadith citations, so neither does this. 1,900 such passages across
781 roots.
example — روح
مَنْ قَتَلَ نَفْسًا مُعَاهِدَةً لَمْ يَرَحْ رَائِحَةَ الجَنَّةِ is red; the verb forms Lane compares around it are not. |
| shāhid | A line of poetry cited as evidence for a usage — 1,393 of them, flowing in place within the sense they evidence. |
| [square brackets] | Lane's own editorial additions — his words, not his Arab sources'. He used them to supply
context his sources left implicit. They are never stripped and never added to.
example — علم, sense 4.1.3
"The horseman made, or appointed, for himself, [or distinguished himself by,]
the mark, sign, token, or badge, of the men of courage." The bracketed clause is Lane's gloss on his source, not the source itself. |
| on this sense | Nothing in Lane's text ties this remark to one particular gloss, so it is shown against the sense as a whole rather than guessing. 856 notes carry it. |
| digitisation corrected | A letter in the electronic source is wrong and has been fixed, with what it said shown beside
what it was corrected to. 14 in the whole build, each enumerated with its evidence.
example — سنو
the source reads يَدْهَبُ, which is not a word; corrected to
يَذْهَبُ on the evidence of Qur'ān 24:43. |
7 · Qur'ānic occurrences, and the āyāt
Two different things sit on a page and they must not be confused.
- Occurrences — at the foot of an entry
- Where the Qur'ān uses this entry's word. 6,209 occurrences across 2,885 entries. They show the word in use. They do not say which sense above applies — the morphology corpus does not carry that, and nothing here infers it.
- An āya quoted in full
- 822 of them, quoted where Lane himself cites the verse. Translation is Abdullah Yusuf Ali (1934), public domain, reproduced verbatim — including its own punctuation.
Lane counted verses differently. He used Flügel's numbering, which differs from the Kufan numbering in print today. His references are mapped across where the mapping is certain, and left alone where it is not.
8 · What was changed from Lane, and what was not
Arabic — never touched
Every Arabic passage is reproduced exactly, vowel points and all — 175,637 of them, with 8,627 more in the morphology bars. No Arabic anywhere in this build was generated, normalised or re-spelled. Where the electronic source itself is corrupt, the correction is shown to you rather than made silently.
Lane's English — modernised and restructured, not rewritten
Archaic wording is replaced, long semicolon chains are broken up, and each sense is split into gloss-and-Arabic lines with the surrounding discussion moved underneath as notes.
he put a mark at such a place in the book — اعلم عَلَى مَوْضِعِ كَذَا مِنَ الكِتَابِ عَلَامَةً
note: Said of a writing or a book.
note: Muḍāriʿ ضَرِبَ, maṣdar ضَرْبٌ: [he beat, struck, smote, or hit him or it]. ضرّب is used rather of several or many objects, as is shown below.
The vocabulary changes are a fixed list of 16 words, applied everywhere and never reversed. They fall into two kinds, and the difference matters.
One — an English calque replaced by the Arabic term
Lane translates the Arabic grammarians' vocabulary into Latinate English that was current in 1863 and is current nowhere now. The Arabic term is the one you will meet in every other grammar, so it is the one used here.
Here: "With fet-ḥ, or أَلِهَ, like تَعِبَ; muḍāriʿ اَلَهَ; maṣdar."
"Aorist" is a Greek tense that Arabic does not have; Lane meant the muḍāriʿ, and said so in the vocabulary of his day.
Here: "…it is an interrogative, and is a mubtadaʾ, with اشد as its khabar…"
Two terms in one sentence. Mubtadaʾ and khabar are the subject and predicate of a nominal sentence — the pair every Arabic grammar names this way, and which "inchoative / enunciative" obscures completely.
Two — a dead English word replaced by a live one
No Arabic term involved; the word has simply fallen out of use, or has changed meaning since Lane wrote.
Here: "It also denotes perfection, or completeness."
The clearest case in this class is tropical → figurative: Lane's "tropical" means of a trope, but the word now means of the tropics, so leaving it would not merely be archaic — it would be read as saying something else.
A word is replaced only where one substitution is always right. Terms of art are left alone: predicament stays where Lane means Aristotle's category, and a word whose plain equivalent is a phrase rather than a word is not substituted at all — that would change his sentence rather than his vocabulary.
The full list:
| Lane writes | This build says | Why |
|---|---|---|
| aorist | muḍāriʿ | the Arabic term is the one a learner meets elsewhere |
| quiescent | sākin | same |
| tropical | figurative | "tropical" now means something else entirely |
| anomalous | irregular | plainer, same meaning |
| preterite | past tense | plainer, same meaning |
| enunciative / inchoative | khabar / mubtadaʾ | the Arabic grammatical terms |
Source citations — removed
Lane names his authorities constantly, in abbreviations meaningful to a 19th-century Arabist and to nobody else: K for the Qāmūs, S for the Ṣiḥāḥ, TA for the Tāj al-ʿArūs, Msb for the Miṣbāḥ, and dozens more. They break up every sentence, and they are a bibliography rather than content.
A named scholar's opinion is not a citation, and is kept — in bold. Er-Rāghib, Az, IB, Th, ISd, Abu Zeyd, El-Fárisee. Where Lane gives their view, you still get it, and you still know whose it is.
Near-synonyms — collapsed only when they say one thing
Lane often gives three English words for one Arabic idea. Where they restate a single act, they are reduced to one. Where he is hedging between genuinely different actions, every option is kept — the hedge is information, and flattening it would misrepresent him.
What was not changed
Lane's entries and senses are his divisions. Nothing here adds, drops, merges, splits or reorders one, and the build refuses to publish if it finds that it has. His square brackets are his. His order of glosses and notes is his — a note sits where he put it.
9 · Limits you should know about
- Blank means Lane is silent
- Not that something is missing. Nothing here fills a gap with a form or a meaning he does not attest.
- The Core sense line is the tool's, not Lane's
- It is the one place where words that are not his appear. It is marked, and the senses are underneath it.
- Occurrences are word-level, not sense-level
- An occurrence says the word is used in that verse. Which of the senses above applies is for you to judge.
- Traditions are marked, not identified
- Red says Lane attributes the Arabic to a tradition. It is not a citation and cannot be followed to a collection.
- The electronic source has faults
- 14 are corrected and shown. Others certainly remain; the verbatim toggle is there so you can always see what the source actually says.
10 · Sources
- The dictionary
- Edward William Lane, An Arabic-English Lexicon (1863–93). Public domain.
- Qur'ānic text and morphology
- Tanzil.net for the text; the Quranic Arabic Corpus morphology for roots and forms.
- Translation
- Abdullah Yusuf Ali (1934). Public domain, quoted verbatim.
Nothing in copyright is used. Hans Wehr is excluded from this project for that reason.