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European-language dictionaries of quranic Arabic first appeared in the mid-nineteenth century, with names of significant scholars attached to some early efforts - F. H. Dieterici in 1881 and C. A. Nallino in 1893, for example. The otherwise unknown John Penrice produced the most lasting and often reprinted work, A Dictionary and Glossary of the Koran (London, 1873). Based primarily on the commentary of al-Bay[LATIN SMALL LETTER D WITH DOT BELOW]awi (d. c. 1291), that book is terse but certainly not unhelpful. The work of Badawi and Abdel Haleem, then, is a significant contribution to the field, although its release has been somewhat upstaged by the appearance of Arne A. Ambros and Stephan Procházka, A Concise Dictionary of Koranic Arabic (Wiesbaden, 2004) and The Nouns of Koranic Arabic Arranged by Topics: A Companion Volume to the "Concise Dictionary of Koranic Arabic" (Wiesbaden, 2006).
Badawi and Abdel Haleem have provided a dictionary that highlights contextual meaning within the Quran, conveyed by the quotation (in Arabic script and with English translation) of illustrative passages from the source text. The definitions of the words are derived from classical commentaries on the Quran and standard classical dictionaries, without, however, an indication of the source of any specific meaning. Entries are structured by root, with the general Arabic meaning of the stem provided (i.e. not limited to quranic meaning), followed by a list of the derivatives of the root and the frequency with which each derivative is used in the Quran. The body of the entry then provides an explanation of the grammatical category of each derivative and its meaning, followed by one illustration (more when idioms are involved) from the Quran of each sense of the word. The order in which the derivatives are presented follows that of [MODIFIER LETTER LEFT HALF RING]Abd al-Baqi's standard concordance (Cairo, 1945). The translations of the quranic passages are derived from Abdel Haleem's recent version (Oxford, 2004), modified as needed by the demands of the dictionary.
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