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 and its Supplement. The Arabic-German dictionary was completed in 1945, but not published until 1952. Writing in the 1960s, a critic commented, "Of all the dictionaries of modern written Arabic, the work ... is the best." It remains the most widely used Arabic-English dictionary. 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". Hans Wehr was a member of the National Socialist Party and argued that the Nazi government should ally with the Arabs against England and France. The Arabic-German dictionary project was funded by the Nazi government, which intended to use it to translate Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf into Arabic. Despite this at least one Jewish scholar, Hedwig Klein, contributed to the dictionary.
Collation
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. This ordering means that forms derived from the same verb stem are not always grouped together. 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 and reconstruct such verb forms based solely on the stem number and the abstract consonantal root.
Transcription and orthography
Transcriptions 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". Other parts of speech such as nouns are fully given transcriptions. Foreign words are transliterated according to pronunciation, for which Arab students at the University of Münster were consulted. This means that the sounds,,,,,,, and, which are used in Modern Standard Arabic pronunciation among well-educated and careful speakers, but cannot be easily represented in standard Arabic script, can be unambiguously indicated. Examples would be مانجو mangō 'mango fruit/tree' and كوري kōrī 'Korean'. As for the Arabic orthography used, word-initial glottal stops or hamza are not written either in the Arabic of the entries or in the transliteration. For example, اكل, which has an initial hamzat al-qaṭʽ, and ابن, which does not have an initial hamzat al-qaṭʽ, are both written without a hamza represented in either the Arabic or the transliteration. In transliteration systems such as DIN 31635, the first would be transliterated as ʼakala, with an apostrophe representing hamza, and the second as ibn, without an apostrophe. Hamzas in the middle and end of words, however, are written, as in مأكل maʼkal "food". Word-final yā’ ي and alif maqṣūra ى are not distinguished in the Arabic: they are both written as ى, without dots. They are, however, distinguished in the transliteration: for example, ثنى and ثني are both written as ثنى, but the first is transliterated as ṯanā and the second as ṯany.
Editions
The English version of the Wehr dictionary is commonly available in two editions. The so-called 3rd edition was printed by Otto Harrassowitz in Wiesbaden, Hesse, in 1961 under the title A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic: Arabic–English, as well as by Spoken Language Services, Inc. of Ithaca, New York, in 1976, under the somewhat different title Arabic–English Dictionary: The Hans Wehr Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic, Edited by J M. Cowan. Librairie du Liban in Lebanon has printed it since 1980, and it is widely available in the Middle East. The 4th edition, which is considerably amended and enlarged, was published in 1979. It was published in 1994 by Spoken Language Services, Inc. of Ithaca, New York, and is usually available in the United States as a compact "student" paperback. In 2019, a two-volume version also started being offered. There is a more recent 5th edition available in German, published by Harrassowitz's publishing house in 1985, also in the city of Wiesbaden, under the title Arabisches Wörterbuch für die Schriftsprache der Gegenwart: Arabisch–Deutsch, unter Mitwirkung von Lorenz Kropfitsch neu bearbeitet und erweitert. It has 1452 pages of dictionary entries.
