A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic

A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic

Hans Wehr's Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic, English-language U.S. edition
Author	Hans Wehr
Genre	Dictionary
Published	1961 (1961)

A 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 ("Arabic dictionary for the contemporary written language") (1952) and its Supplement (1959). The Arabic-German dictionary was completed in 1945, but not published until 1952.^[1] Writing in the 1960s, a critic commented, "Of all the dictionaries of modern written Arabic, the work [in question] ... is the best."^[2] It remains the most widely used Arabic-English dictionary.^[3]

The work is compiled on descriptive principles: only words and expressions that are attested in context are included.^[4] "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".^[5]

Hans Wehr was a member of the National Socialist (Nazi) 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.^[1]

Besides English speakers, the dictionary is also very popular among Arabic language learners in Japan.^[6]