Abu Nasr Isma'il ibn Hammad al-Jawhari (ابو نصرإسماعيل بن حماد الجوهري) also known asImam al-Jauhari (died 1002 or 1008) was a medievalTurkic[1][2]lexicographer and the author of a notable Arabic dictionaryal-Ṣiḥāḥ fī al-Lughah (الصحاح في اللغة).
He was born in the city of Farab[3] (Otrar) inTransoxiana (in today's southernKazakhstan). He began his studies of the Arabic language in Farab,[3] then studied inBaghdad, continuing among the Arabs of theHejaz,[4] then moving to northernKhurāsān, first toDamghan before settling finally atNishapur.[3] It was here that he met his death in a failed attempt atflight from the roof of a mosque, possibly due todelusions of being a bird.[5]
Taj al-Lugha wa Sihah al-Arabiya (الصحاح تاج اللغة وصحاح العربية)[6] "The Crown of Language and the Correct Arabic" - His magnum opus dictionary of Arabic; often abbreviated asal-Sihah fi al-Lugha, "The Correct Language", andal-Sihah (الصحاح).[7] It contains about 40,000 dictionary entries.[8] Written in Nishapur, it was incomplete at his death and completed by a student. Al-Jawhari uses an alphabetical ordering system with the last letter of a word's root being the first ordering criterion.Al-Sihah is a principal Arabic dictionary of the medieval era and later compilers of Arabic dictionaries incorporated its material. Over the centuries several abridgements and elaborations in Arabic were produced and a large portion was copied into the huge 13th century dictionary compilationLisan al-Arab; published online athttp://www.baheth.infoArchived 2013-10-29 at theWayback Machine.[4] A fully searchable online edition available atBaheth.infoArchived 2017-04-15 at theWayback Machine.
Edition begun by E. Scheidius with a Latin translation, but one part only appeared atHarderwijk (1776).[3]
^Youssef, H. A., Youssef, F. A., & Dening, T. R. (1996). Evidence for the existence of schizophrenia in medieval Islamic society. History of Psychiatry, 7(25), 059. doi:10.1177/0957154x9600702503
^History of Humanity, edited by Muḥammad ʻAdnān Bakhīt, year 2000. The section headed "Grammar and Lexicography" written by Ahmad Yusuf Al-Hasan.
^See library catalogs atClassify.OCLC.org. Also C. Brockelmann,Geschichte der arabischen Literatur (Weimar, 1898).
^Theal-Sihah of al-Jawhari was rendered as an Arabic–Turkish dictionary by Vankulu (died 1592) and was published in Istanbul in 1729. This publication is of significance in the history of publishing under the Ottomans, as discussed in the article about its publisherIbrahim Muteferrika. Further information atrefArchived 2017-03-05 at theWayback Machine.
