Who and what these names are

A philologist from Qazvin, in what is now Iran, who wrote in Arabic. He is the single source quoted most often on this site, because his central idea is the one everything here is built on: that every Arabic root has one core sense, and every word grown from that root carries it. When a post explains what three letters "really mean", it is usually his answer being reported.

His dictionary, and the reason he matters. Instead of listing words alphabetically with their meanings, it is arranged by root, and each entry opens by stating what those letters mean before any particular word is built from them. Six volumes. When you see a citation like "Maqāyīs, root سمو, vol 3 p 98", that is the volume and page the sentence came from.

The fullest Arabic to English dictionary ever made, compiled from the classical Arabic dictionaries over decades. It is used here as a second witness: if Lane and Ibn Fāris agree about a root independently, that is worth more than either alone. Lane died before finishing, so coverage thins in the later letters.

The founder of Arabic grammar as a discipline. His book is called simply al-Kitāb, "The Book", which tells you how it was regarded. Almost every grammatical argument after him is either agreeing with him or explaining why not.

A Tunisian scholar, and the most modern voice quoted here. His commentary al-Taḥrīr wa'l-Tanwīr is unusually good on the question this site keeps asking: why this word, and not the other word that would have meant almost the same thing.

Wrote the earliest large commentary on the Quran that survives whole. His method is to collect what the earliest generations said about a verse and report it with the chain of who said it, rather than give his own opinion first.

A report of something the Prophet ﷺ said, did, or allowed, carried down through a named chain of people who heard it from each other. The collections quoted here, Bukhari and Muslim among them, are the ones that graded those chains most strictly. A hadith is cited by collection and number so anyone can go and check it.

The English translation quoted on this site. It was chosen because it stays close to the Arabic word order and does not smooth a hard phrase into something easier, which is what you want when the whole point is which word was used. Where the literal English hides the sense, Abdel Haleem is quoted underneath it.

The grammarians of Basra, in southern Iraq. They favoured consistent rules and were reluctant to accept an odd usage as evidence unless it was well attested. Sībawayh belongs to this school.

The grammarians of Kufa, further north. They were more willing to accept what Arabs actually said, even when it broke the pattern. When a post says the two schools disagreed about where a word comes from, this is the argument, and often it was never settled. Both positions get recorded here rather than one being picked.

Almost every Arabic noun and verb grows out of a skeleton of three consonants. Those three letters carry a core idea, and the words built on them are that idea in different shapes. Learn ك ت ب and you have the seed of "he wrote", "a book", "a writer", "an office", "a library". This is why the site studies roots rather than words: one root is a whole family.

The shape a root is poured into. The root gives the meaning; the pattern decides what kind of word it becomes and what it does. Two words from one root can mean noticeably different things purely because of the shape they are in, and that difference is often where the interesting part of a verse lives.

A letter with no vowel on it. Most Arabic letters carry a short vowel that you pronounce after them. A letter in jazm carries none, so it closes the syllable instead of opening one. It matters here because Arabic cannot start a word on a letter with no vowel, which is why a helping alif appears in front of اسم and then disappears again inside بِسْمِ.

The three pieces of a normal Arabic sentence. The fiʿl is the action. The fāʿil is whoever does it. The mafʿūl is whatever the action lands on. English does the same job with word order; Arabic does it with endings, so the pieces can move around and still be understood. Naming them is how you notice when one is missing.

A preposition together with the word it governs, taken as one unit. بِ plus اسْم is a jārr and majrūr. On its own such a unit is never a sentence. It is a detail, and it has to attach to some action to mean anything, which is exactly the point Bismillah turns on.

Arabic marks a word's job in the sentence on its final vowel. Change the vowel and you change whether the word is doing the action, receiving it, or being owned by the word before it. Iʿrāb is the analysis of those endings: going through a sentence word by word and saying what each one is doing and why it wears the ending it wears.

The small marks above and below Arabic letters that give the short vowels. Ordinary written Arabic leaves them out and readers supply them. The Quran is written with them all in place, which is why the script here looks more decorated than Arabic you may see elsewhere.

Commentary on the Quran. A tafsīr works through the text explaining what is meant, what the occasion was, how the grammar works and where scholars disagreed. When this site quotes one, it names which.

The canonical ways of reciting the Quran. In a small number of places the established recitations differ slightly, and occasionally that difference changes the shade of meaning. Where that happens in a verse being studied, the post says so and says who recited which.

The written copy of the Quran, as opposed to the recited Quran. When a post says the Arabic was taken verbatim from the muṣḥaf, it means it was copied from a verified text rather than typed from memory.

An ayah is a verse. A surah is a chapter. A reference like 1:4 means the first surah, fourth ayah.