100 Fun Facts About Arabic

Arabic belongs to which language family?

Afroasiatic also takes in Hebrew, Amharic, Nigeria's Hausa and ancient Egyptian, so Arabic is a distant cousin of the language of the pharaohs.

Arabic runs right to left, but which part of a line is still written left to right?

Numbers keep their biggest digit on the left, as in English, so a line of Arabic with a date or a price in it changes direction and back again.

Which letter comes first in the Arabic alphabet?

Alif is thought to have begun as a drawing of an ox's head, the same sign the Greeks turned into alpha and the Romans into A, so the Arabic and English alphabets open with one ancient letter.

What is the term for a writing system like Arabic's, whose letters mainly record consonants?

An abjad spells out consonants and leaves readers to supply short vowels from context; Arabic's vowel marks are saved mainly for the Quran, children's books and learners' texts.

In Arabic names, what does 'ibn' or 'bin' mean?

Son of is what ibn or bin means; the reverse exists too: abu, 'father of', lets a man go by his child's name, as Mahmoud Abbas is known as Abu Mazen.

Which of these is, like Arabic, one of the six official languages of the United Nations?

Russian has been official since 1946; Arabic became the sixth and last in 1973, and a delegate who speaks in any of the six is interpreted live into the other five.

Which UN agency has celebrated World Arabic Language Day every 18 December since 2012?

UNESCO picked 18 December because on that day in 1973 the General Assembly voted to make Arabic the United Nations' sixth official language.

Which of these languages is written today in a script adapted from Arabic's?

Urdu is written in an adapted Arabic script, while its close relative Hindi uses Devanagari; Turkish was written in Arabic letters too until the republic switched to the Latin alphabet in 1928.

Which European language shows the heaviest Arabic influence, thanks to centuries of Al-Andalus?

Spanish took a large stock of words from Arabic; even ojalá, 'hopefully', began as an Arabic phrase about God willing it.

Which of these English words is of Arabic origin?

Algebra comes from al-jabr, 'restoration', in the title of al-Khwarizmi's 9th-century treatise; the Arabic word also covered setting broken bones, and English first used algebra for bone-setting.

Which of these everyday English words came from Arabic?

Mattress goes back to the Arabic maṭraḥ, 'a place where something is thrown down': a cushion or rug tossed on the floor to lie on.

What do Arabic speakers call classical and modern standard Arabic, meaning "the eloquent"?

Al-fuṣḥā covers both the Quran's Arabic and a modern newsreader's: 'Classical' and 'Modern Standard' is a split Western linguists draw, and Arabic speakers generally do not.

What is the term for using two varieties of one language in different social settings, as in Arabic?

Educated Arabs speak their school-taught standard plus a native dialect, and switch between them, sometimes mid-sentence.

Which spoken dialect is among the most widely understood in the Arab world, thanks to its films and TV?

Around 67 million people speak it in Egypt alone.

Which North African dialect is hardest for Arabic speakers from the Levant and the Gulf to understand?

Moroccan Arabic is hard for eastern speakers to follow, yet the gap runs one way: Moroccans usually understand the best-known eastern dialects, which reach them through popular media.

Maghrebi Arabic, spoken across Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya, is also known by what name?

Darija means roughly 'everyday' or 'popular' speech, the name North Africans give their dialects to set them apart from formal, written Arabic.

Which everyday Arabic word means 'come on' or 'let's go'?

Yalla is a squeezed-down yā Allāh, 'O God', and it travels well: Hebrew and Turkish slang have both borrowed it.

Most Arabic letters change shape depending on what?

Their position in a word matters because Arabic is always written joined-up, even in print, so most letters have one form for the start, one for the middle, one for the end and one for standing alone.

The collection that gave us Aladdin and Sinbad is called Alf Layla wa-Layla in Arabic, so what does 'layla' mean?

Night: the title is literally 'a thousand nights and a night'. Aladdin himself was in no Arabic original; a French translator added his tale in the 1700s after hearing it from a Syrian storyteller.

Which Gulf state's name means 'the two seas' in Arabic?

Bahrain is baḥr, 'sea', with the ending -ayn, the dual form Arabic uses for exactly two of anything; which two seas were meant is still disputed.

Whose al-Kitāb was the first comprehensive description of the Arabic language?

Sibawayhi was not an Arab by birth, yet his al-Kitāb, simply 'The Book', became the founding text of Arabic grammar.

The Arabic word kitāb means 'book', so what is a maktaba?

A library: the prefix ma- marks a place, so a maktaba is a place of books. Both words grow from the root k-t-b, as most Arabic words grow from three consonants set into vowel patterns.

Standard Arabic lacks which English consonant, often replaced with a 'b'?

P has no letter in the standard Arabic alphabet, so borrowed names swap it for a b: Paul is Būlus in Arabic.

Which Arabic script style is the one used in print and by computers?

Naskh won out because it is easy to read: it grew out of everyday business handwriting, then took over the copying of books, the Quran included, long before fonts adopted it.

Which two letters form the only mandatory ligature in Arabic writing?

Lām and alif always merge into the looped shape لا, and that shape alone spells lā, the Arabic word for 'no'; every other ligature in the script is optional.

Which three Arabic letters share one basic shape and differ only by their dots?

b, t and th are one shallow curve told apart only by dots: one below for b, two above for t, three above for th. The earliest Quran manuscripts used such dots sparingly, so readers had to work the letters out.

Arabic script evolved from which earlier script, written by the people who carved Petra?

Nabataean belonged to an Arab kingdom that wrote its inscriptions in Aramaic; a cursive form of its letters then grew into the Arabic alphabet from the 4th century on.

Which place's name began as the Arabic Jabal Ṭāriq, 'Tariq's mountain'?

Gibraltar is Jabal Ṭāriq worn down by European tongues; it honours Tariq ibn Ziyad, the general whose army crossed from North Africa in 711 and began the Muslim conquest of Iberia.

Morocco's Arabic name, al-Maghrib, points to which direction?

West: al-Maghrib means 'the place where the sun sets', and medieval Arab geographers called the region the Farthest West; the sunset prayer goes by the same word.

Europe calls the digits 0 to 9 'Arabic numerals', but where did the Arabs themselves get them from?

India is where the system began: al-Khwarizmi of Baghdad spread it around 825 with a book titled On the Calculation with Hindu Numerals, centuries before Europe named the digits after the Arabs.

How is the number 24 spoken in Arabic?

Four and twenty is the Arabic order, units before tens, as in German vierundzwanzig; older English did the same, which is why a nursery rhyme bakes four and twenty blackbirds in a pie.

Which Italian scholar's 13th-century Liber Abaci was crucial in spreading Arabic numerals in Europe?

Fibonacci wrote Liber Abaci in 1202; one of its worked puzzles, about a growing colony of rabbits, produced the number sequence that now carries his name.

In the informal online "Arabic chat alphabet", which numeral often stands in for the letter ⟨ع⟩ (ʿayn)?

3 was chosen because it looks like a mirror image of ع; the habit began when phones and chat software could type only Latin characters, so numerals filled in for sounds the Latin alphabet lacks.

Which 19th-century literary renaissance sought to fuse Arabic and European forms of expression?

The Nahda, 'the awakening' or 'renaissance', took off as printing presses spread through Egypt and the Levant, and its writers tried to simplify Arabic so that a wider public could read them.

Damascus's Arabic language academy was modelled on which European institution?

The Académie française was the stated model when Damascus founded the oldest Arabic language academy just after the First World War; Cairo followed in 1932, and the academies rule on which new words enter their standard dictionaries.

Which institution of the Abbasid caliphs is traditionally credited with translating Greek learning into Arabic?

The House of Wisdom was the caliphs' royal library in Baghdad, lost when the Mongols sacked the city in 1258; some historians think its fame as a formal translation academy is overdrawn.

Which Córdoba-born philosopher wrote in Judeo-Arabic, which is Arabic set down in Hebrew letters?

Maimonides wrote his Guide for the Perplexed in Judeo-Arabic while living in Egypt; his great code of Jewish law, the Mishneh Torah, was the exception, composed in Hebrew.

Which naval rank comes from the Arabic amīr, meaning 'commander'?

Admiral began as amīr, 'commander', the word that also gave English emir; the d crept in later, probably because scribes had the Latin for 'admire' in their heads.

What is the literal meaning of the Arabic title 'sheikh'?

Old man is the literal sense, from a verb meaning 'to grow old'; English later gave it a very different ring, when Rudolph Valentino's 1921 film The Sheik made the word slang for a romantic lover.

The Arabic word al-hatif, once meaning an unseen voice, was repurposed to mean what?

Telephone: language purists revived hātif, an old word for an invisible caller, rather than borrow a foreign term; jarīda, 'newspaper', was recycled the same way from a stripped palm branch.

The Arabic word lāzaward, kin to English 'azure', names which blue stone?

Lapis lazuli and azure are the same word twice: 'lazuli' kept the l, while azure lost it, probably when Romance speakers took the l for their word for 'the'.

Which Arabic news channel's name can mean either 'the island' or 'the peninsula'?

Al Jazeera reads both ways because Arabic uses one word, jazīra, for the two: Arabs call their own peninsula Jazīrat al-ʿArab, literally 'the island of the Arabs'.

Which English word for a periodical began as an Arabic word for 'storehouses'?

Magazine first meant a storehouse, above all for gunpowder, which is why a gun still has one; the Gentleman's Magazine of 1731 borrowed the word for a printed storehouse of articles.

Arabic grammar sorts its consonants into two groups named after which pair?

Sun and moon: ash-shams, 'the sun', swallows the l of al-, while al-qamar, 'the moon', keeps it, and every consonant behaves like one or the other.

The Arabic word ṣifr, 'empty', gave English both 'zero' and which other word?

Cipher first meant zero itself, then any numeral, and finally a secret code, because early codes swapped digits for letters.

Maltese grew out of medieval Sicilian Arabic, so which of these Arabic dialects is its closest living relative?

Tunisian is the nearest living relative, yet the two have drifted far apart: Maltese soaked up Sicilian and Italian words and is the only offshoot of Arabic written in the Latin alphabet.

A few hundred Arabic speakers on a mountain near Nablus belong to which people of the Bible?

Samaritans, the people of the Good Samaritan parable, numbered under a thousand in the 2020s; those on Mount Gerizim speak Arabic, and the whole community still gathers there to sacrifice lambs at Passover.

Which monster of horror fiction began as a grave-robbing demon of Arabian folklore?

Ghoul is the Arabic ghūl, which reached English in 1786 through the novel Vathek; the star Algol, 'the demon', is named after the same creature.

Which bright star's name is short for an Arabic phrase meaning 'the flying eagle'?

Altair is short for an-nasr aṭ-ṭāʾir, 'the flying eagle', and it shines in Aquila, the Eagle; nearby Vega got a matching name, from a phrase usually translated as 'the falling eagle'.

Which angular Arabic script, favoured for early Qurans, takes its name from a city in Iraq?

Kufic is named after Kufa; its blocky strokes suit stone and tile as well as parchment, and the words on Iraq's national flag are written in it.

Which feature of English writing has no counterpart in the Arabic script?

Capital letters have no Arabic counterpart, so a name or the first word of a sentence looks like any other word; and where English pads a line with wider spaces, Arabic can stretch the strokes that join its letters.

Which English word began as the Arabic name for a fine black powder used as eyeliner?

Alcohol began as al-kuḥl, kohl, the powder for darkening the eyelids; Europeans stretched the word to any fine powder, then to any distilled essence, and at last to the spirit in wine.

What does the word 'Quran' literally mean in Arabic?

Recitation: the word comes from qaraʾa, 'to read' or 'to recite', and Muslim tradition tells that the revelations began in a cave near Mecca with a command to Muhammad from the same root: iqraʾ, 'recite'.

Through which language did most Arabic loanwords enter Hindustani and Turkish?

Persian was a prestige language of court and literature for both the Ottomans and the Mughals, so Arabic words reached Turkish and Hindustani second-hand, passed along by Persian speakers.

The Alhambra, the Moorish palace in Granada, takes its name from the Arabic for which colour?

Red: al-Ḥamrāʾ is Arabic for 'the red one', a name that probably comes from the reddish rammed earth of the fortress's outer walls.

During its revival, Modern Hebrew drew on Arabic for what?

Vocabulary and roots were what Eliezer Ben-Yehuda wanted from Arabic: he had the Hebrew Language Committee coin missing words from a fellow Semitic language rather than borrow from European ones.

The vowel signs Arabic uses today began as miniature versions of what?

Its own letters, shrunk to marks: in the eighth century al-Farahidi drew the u sign as a tiny wāw and the i sign as part of a yāʾ, and his scheme has stayed essentially unchanged ever since.

What does the Arabic phrase 'as-salamu alaykum' mean?

Peace be upon you is answered by turning the phrase around: 'wa alaykumu s-salam', and upon you be peace. Hebrew's 'shalom aleichem' is the same greeting in a sister language.

The name of the Sahara comes from an Arabic word meaning what?

Desert is all the Arabic ṣaḥrāʾ means, so 'Sahara Desert' says the same thing twice; Arabic speakers call it al-Ṣaḥrāʾ al-Kubrā, the Great Desert.

Which weather word reached English from the Arabic for 'season'?

Monsoon began as the Arabic mawsim, the time of year when the Indian Ocean winds turned and ships could sail east; Portuguese sailors picked the word up there and passed it on as monção.

Which drink's English name descends from the Arabic qahwa, passed on through Ottoman Turkish kahve?

Coffee owes its name to qahwah, a word that medieval Arabic dictionaries linked to an older term for wine. It reached English by way of Dutch.

Which vast African region has a name that is simply the Arabic word for 'deserts'?

Sahara comes from the Arabic ṣaḥārā, 'deserts', which makes the English phrase 'Sahara Desert' a repetition: it says 'desert' twice.

Which British territory takes its name from the Arabic Jabal Ṭāriq, meaning 'Mount of Tariq'?

Gibraltar is named for Tariq ibn Ziyad, the commander whose army crossed from North Africa in 711 and began the Muslim conquest of Iberia.

Which naval rank's English name traces back to the Arabic word amīr, meaning 'commander'?

Admiral first meant a Saracen chieftain on land and only later went to sea. English borrowed the same Arabic word a second time as 'emir'.

Which storyteller narrates the Arabic classic One Thousand and One Nights to delay her execution?

Scheherazade leaves each night's tale unfinished, so the king, curious to hear the ending, keeps postponing her death until he finally spares her.

The protective amulet called a khamsa takes its name from the Arabic word for which number?

Five is khamsa in Arabic, one for each finger of the open palm that the charm shows. Europeans later nicknamed the amulet the Hand of Fatima.

What does the Arabic word shukran mean, usually answered with the reply ʿafwan?

Thank you is shukran, an adverb formed from shukr, 'thankfulness'. The stock reply, ʿafwan, means 'you're welcome' or 'don't mention it'.

The numerals 0 to 9 reached Europe through Arabic scholars but were invented in which country?

India is where mathematicians invented the place-value system between the 1st and 4th centuries; Europeans named its digits after the Arabic speakers who passed them on.

The dip hummus, eaten across the Arab world, is named with the Arabic word for which ingredient?

Chickpeas are ḥummuṣ in Arabic, so the dish's full name, ḥummuṣ bi ṭaḥīna, simply lists what goes in: chickpeas with tahini.

Which East African language takes its name from an Arabic word meaning 'of the coasts'?

Swahili emerged on the shores of Kenya and Tanzania in contact with Arab traders, and Arabic is by far its largest source of borrowed words.

What is the meaning of the Arabic greeting as-salāmu ʿalaykum, used by Muslims all over the world?

Peace be upon you is worded as if to a group, yet the same form greets one person; the reply turns it around as wa-ʿalaykumu s-salām.

What does the Arabic expression inshallah mean, said when speaking of plans for the future?

If God wills is the literal sense, but Arabic speakers of every religion use the phrase much as English speakers say 'hopefully'.

What does the Arabic word habibi mean when said to a man, with habibti used for a woman?

My darling is ḥabīb, 'beloved', with the ending -ī, 'my', added; ḥabība, the feminine form, takes the same ending.

Which English word comes from al-kuḥl, the Arabic name for a fine dark powder used as eye makeup?

Alcohol first meant a fine powder like the eyeliner itself, then any purified essence. Only in the 1700s did it settle on the intoxicating part of strong drink.

The Arabic word ṣifr, 'empty', gave English the number zero and which other word?

Cipher first meant zero itself, then any digit. It came to mean secret writing because early codes often swapped numbers for letters.

Which English word comes from the Arabic makhāzin, 'storehouses'?

Magazine meant a warehouse, above all one for ammunition, long before the first periodicals borrowed the word in 1731 to suggest a storehouse of information.

Which month of the Islamic calendar has a name that comes from an Arabic word for scorching heat?

Ramadan is the ninth month, the one of dawn-to-sunset fasting. Since the lunar calendar adds no leap months, it drifts through every season, cool ones included.

Which day of the week is al-jumʿa in Arabic, a name meaning 'gathering' after its communal prayer?

Friday takes its Arabic name from the congregational prayer at the mosque, and Turkish, Malay and Indonesian all borrowed their own word for the day from it.

In Arabic names such as Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd, what does the word 'ibn' mean?

Son of is the meaning, so Ibn Khaldun is simply 'son of Khaldun'. Everyday speech shortens the word to bin, and a daughter uses bint instead.

Which red giant star in Taurus has an Arabic name meaning 'the follower', as it trails the Pleiades?

Aldebaran is in good company, because most of the star names accepted in Western astronomy are Arabic, with only a few Greek ones among them.

The name of the Quran, the holy book of Islam, comes from an Arabic word with which meaning?

The recitation suits a scripture meant to be spoken aloud: in prayer the Quran is recited only in Arabic, ideally with a special prosody called tajwid.

Which Arabic word, often tied to warfare in English, literally means 'striving' or 'struggling'?

Jihad covers almost any effort to live by God's guidance, and Islamic teaching calls the inner fight against one's own impulses the 'greater' jihad.

What does the Arabic word khalīfa mean, the source of the title caliph first held by Abu Bakr?

Successor is the sense, traditionally taken as short for 'successor of the messenger of God', since each caliph claimed to follow Muhammad as leader of the Muslim community.

Which Saudi holy city, once called Yathrib, bears a name that just means 'the city' in Arabic?

Medina is short for Madīnat an-Nabī, 'City of the Prophet', and the same Arabic word labels the old walled quarter of many North African towns.

Which Arab state, joined to Saudi Arabia by a causeway, has an Arabic name meaning 'the two seas'?

Bahrain's name puzzles scholars, who dispute which two seas were meant: the waters on either side, or the salt sea above and the fresh springs below.

The Alhambra, the Moorish palace above Granada, takes its name from an Arabic phrase meaning what?

The red one describes the walls, built of rammed earth with a reddish tint; the full Arabic name meant 'the red fortress'.

Which Renaissance stringed instrument has a name traced to the Arabic al-ʿūd, meaning 'the wood'?

Lute is al-ʿūd with the article swallowed: Europeans heard 'al' as part of the word, which gave Old Provençal laut and then the English form.

Which weather word did Portuguese sailors take from the Arabic mawsim, meaning 'season'?

Monsoon first named the trade wind that reverses with the time of year, which told captains when to sail; the sense of heavy seasonal rain came later.

Which English word traces back to ḥashshāshīn, an Arabic nickname for a sect of the Crusader era?

Assassin recalls the Nizari Ismailis, whom medieval Europeans believed killed rival leaders while high on hashish, though no evidence shows that they used the drug.

Which author of the Cairo Trilogy won a Nobel Prize in Literature for novels written in Arabic?

Naguib Mahfouz followed one Cairo family through three generations, and named the trilogy's three novels after real streets in the city where he grew up.

Which grammatical number, lost in modern English, does Arabic keep beside the singular and plural?

Dual forms cover exactly a pair of anything: Arabic adds the ending -ān to a noun, so a pair of books or cats never takes the ordinary plural.

Arabic nouns that reshape their inner vowels rather than add an ending have which kind of plural?

Broken is the grammarians' word because the pattern of the singular is taken apart and rebuilt, whereas a 'sound' plural leaves the word whole and simply adds a suffix.

Which question is an Arabic speaker asking with 'kayfa ḥāluk', often said straight after a greeting?

How are you is, word for word, 'how is your condition', and the ending shifts with the listener: ḥāluka to a man, ḥāluki to a woman.

The Arabic reply to 'good morning', ṣabāḥ an-nūr, literally wishes the listener a morning of what?

Light answers 'good': the first speaker says ṣabāḥ al-khayr, 'morning of good', and ṣabāḥ an-nūr is the set reply.

Which 14th-century Arabic work by Ibn Khaldun is often called a forerunner of modern sociology?

The Muqaddimah, whose title simply means 'the introduction', was written in 1377 as the opening volume of a far longer history of the world.

Which seven pre-Islamic Arabic poems are called the 'hanging odes', said to have hung at the Kaaba?

Mu'allaqat means 'the suspended ones': a medieval account says the Arabs so prized the poems that they wrote them in gold on linen and hung them at the shrine in Mecca.

The '-i' ending of English words such as Iraqi and Kuwaiti copies which Arabic adjective suffix?

Nisba means 'relation': the ending turns a noun into an adjective, so it also builds surnames that tell where a family came from, such as al-Iraqi.

Which 10th-century Arabic court poet is known by a nickname meaning 'the would-be prophet'?

Al-Mutanabbi earned the name by claiming to be a prophet and gathering followers; his pride may have cost him his life, when people mocked in his verse attacked him.

Which system of melodic modes, with its quarter tones, underlies traditional Arabic music?

Maqam is also the everyday Arabic word for 'place' or 'position', and each mode sets out the pitches and patterns that a musician explores when improvising.

Which Arabic book of animal fables, translated by Ibn al-Muqaffa, is named after two jackals?

Kalila wa-Dimna grew out of the Sanskrit Panchatantra; in the Arabic version the two jackals both tell the stories and star in them at the court of a lion king.