Mujam al-Lugha al-Arabiya al-Muasira
- Author died
- 1424 AH
- Editions
- Alam Al Kotob
Mu‘jam al-Lughah al-‘Arabiyyah al-Mu‘asirah (Arabic: معجم اللغة العربية المعاصرة, Dictionary of Contemporary Arabic Language) is a modern Arabic lexicon compiled by the Egyptian linguist Ahmad Mukhtar Umar (d. 1424 AH / 2003 CE) with the assistance of a specialized research team . The work documents active modern Arabic vocabulary, newly coined expressions, scientific and technical terms, and contextual collocations across the Arab world .
Conception and Corpus
The project was conceived by Ahmad Mukhtar Umar to address perceived deficiencies in traditional and modern Arabic lexicography, particularly the conflation of obsolete and living words, the omission of modern neologisms, and the neglect of collocations and contextual idioms . Umar designed the methodology, oversaw the majority of the compilation, and trained an editorial team that completed the remaining portions following his death in 1424 AH .
The dictionary was constructed using automated computational scanning alongside manual extraction from a text corpus exceeding 100 million words . This material was drawn from:
- Major Arab newspapers and periodicals published over a twenty-year span, such as al-Ahram, al-Sharq al-Awsat, al-Hayat, al-Siyasah al-Duwaliyyah, Sutoor, al-Faysal, and al-Dawhah .
- Broadcast media in Standard Arabic, including news bulletins, commentaries, and religious programming .
- Literature for children and young adults .
- Writings of contemporary authors, scholars, philosophers, historians, economists, and legal theorists .
- Classical texts actively used in modern discourse, including the Quran, Hadith, and proverbs .
- Decisions, approved terms, and stylistic rulings of the Academy of the Arabic Language in Cairo .
- Existing lexical correction manuals, functional vocabulary inventories, and survey dictionaries .
The dictionary incorporates contemporary terminology from politics, economics, media, and technology, including words such as ‘ilmaniyyah (secularism), khas khasah (privatization), istinsakh (cloning), gasil al-amwal (money laundering), and ta‘wim al-‘umlah (currency flotation) .
Structure and Content
Entries in the dictionary are classified into five grammatical categories:
- Verbs (af‘al), cited in the past tense .
- Singular nouns (asma’ mufradah) .
- Dual nouns (asma’ muthanna), comprising 24 independent entries where no singular form is in common use or where structural changes occurred .
- Plural nouns (asma’ majmu‘ah), comprising 1,362 entries, used when the plural form is more widespread than its singular, lacks a singular, or functions as a collective noun (such as generic plant and animal names) .
- Function words (kalimat wazifiyyah), including prepositions, interrogatives, relative pronouns, demonstratives, conditional particles, adverbs, and frozen verbal forms .
The work contains 10,000 specialized terms distributed across 34 academic and scientific disciplines . It includes 43,385 additional illustrative citations (amthilah idafiyyah) drawn from Quranic verses, canonical Quranic readings (qira’at), Hadith, poetry, proverbs, and everyday modern usage . Proper nouns are excluded, with exceptions made for names of prophets, Quranic terminology, and certain figures connected to Islamic history .
Methodology and Arrangement
Entries are arranged alphabetically according to their root consonants (judhur) . Under each root, verbal entries are presented first (bare trilaterals, augmented triliterals, bare quadriliterals, and augmented quadriliterals), followed by nominal entries and function words in alphabetical sequence .
For verbal entries, the dictionary records the present tense (mudari‘), non-standard imperatives, verbal nouns (masadir), active participles (fa‘il), and passive participles (maf‘ul), alongside prepositions governing transitive and intransitive verbs . For nominal entries, it records non-standard plurals, secondary plurals (jam‘ al-jam‘), irregular duals, and gender variants .
Definitions employ synonyms, antonyms, formal analytical definitions, and ostensive or real-world descriptions, while avoiding circularity, nested cross-references, and obscure vocabulary . Multiple meanings under a single entry are organized by presenting general meanings before specific ones, high-frequency usages before less frequent ones (determined by automated frequency counts), and standard linguistic senses before disciplinary terminological senses .
Publication and Indexes
The dictionary was first published in 1429 AH / 2008 CE by ‘Alam al-Kutub in Cairo . It was issued in four volumes with continuous pagination, comprising three volumes of dictionary text and a fourth dedicated volume of analytical indexes .
The print edition contains four specialized indexes:
- Index of contextualized entries (Fihris al-madakhil fi al-amthilah) .
- Index of morphological data for nouns (Fihris al-ma‘lumat al-sarfiyyah lil-asma’) .
- Index of contextual expressions and idioms (Fihris al-ta‘birat al-siyaqiyyah) .
- Index of scientific and specialized terminology (Fihris al-mustalahat), categorized alphabetically by discipline .
An electronic version was produced alongside the print edition, featuring full-text search systems .
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