Mujam Diwan al-Adab
- Author died
- 350 AH
- Editions
- Mu’assasat Dār al-Sha‘b lil-Ṣiḥāfah wal-Ṭibā‘ah wal-Nashr
Diwan al-Adab (Dīwān al-Adab, "The Register of Belles-Lettres") is an Arabic dictionary compiled by the lexicographer Abu Ibrahim Ishaq ibn Ibrahim al-Farabi (d. c. 350 AH / 961 CE), organized around morphological patterns and phonetic root structures.
Composition and Context
Al-Farabi hailed from Farab in Transoxiana and was the maternal uncle of the lexicographer Abu Nasr Ismail ibn Hammad al-Jawhari. According to an account reported by Ibn al-Qifti, al-Farabi traveled extensively until settling in Zabid in Yemen, where he composed Diwan al-Adab and died before transmitting it broadly; however, other biographical traditions record that it was actively transmitted and read by his nephew al-Jawhari and subsequent scholars in Khurasan and Baghdad.
Structure and Methodology
Diwan al-Adab is arranged into six major divisions (kutub):
- Kitab al-Salim (sound roots)
- Kitab al-Muda'af (geminate roots)
- Kitab al-Mithal (assimilated roots beginning with waw or ya')
- Kitab Dhawat al-Thalatha (hollow roots with a medial weak letter)
- Kitab Dhawat al-Arba'a (defective roots with a final weak letter)
- Kitab al-Hamza (roots containing a hamza)
Each of the six divisions is split into two halves: nouns (asma') first, followed by verbs (af'al). Entries are classified systematically according to their morphological templates (abniya), prioritizing simpler syllabic forms (such as unvoweled middle radicals and open short vowels) over heavier ones. Within each morphological category, words are arranged alphabetically according to their final radical letters, effectively pioneering the rhyme-order lexicographical scheme.
Al-Farabi appended morphological treatises (tadhyilat) to the verb sections, detailing general rules of derivation, verbal nouns (masadir), active and passive participles, and imperative formations. He omitted purely regular derivational forms from the dictionary text to maintain conciseness, relying instead on these programmatic explanations.
Reception and Influence
The work earned widespread esteem among classical scholars, who referred to it as "the scale of the language" (mizan al-lugha) and "the yardstick of Arabic" (mi'yar al-arabiyya). The poet Abu al-Ala al-Ma'arri reportedly committed the entire dictionary to memory, and the Yemeni scholar Nashwan ibn Sa'id al-Himyari composed verses celebrating its depth and drew upon it for his own lexicon, Shams al-Ulum. Later lexicographers, including Abu Mansur al-Tha'alibi, al-Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Saghani, and Jalal al-Din al-Suyuti, cited it extensively.
Its morphological framework laid the groundwork for al-Jawhari's al-Sihah, which extracted its lexical material while streamlining its complex structure into a direct rhyme-alphabetical format. Later scholars also noted structural difficulties: its strict division by pattern meant that derivatives of a single root were dispersed across separate sections, and it lacked distinct categories for passive verb forms or particles, subsuming the former into active verb chapters and the latter into noun chapters.
Adaptations and Publications
Diwan al-Adab was abridged by al-Hasan ibn al-Muzaffar al-Naysaburi (d. 442 AH / 1050 CE), while Abu Sa'id Muhammad ibn Ja'far al-Ghawri expanded it into a ten-volume work that retained al-Farabi's framework while supplementing its entries. The original dictionary was critically edited by Ahmad Mukhtar Umar, reviewed by Ibrahim Anis, and published by the Academy of the Arabic Language in Cairo in four volumes accompanied by a separate index volume (1394 AH / 1974 CE).
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