al-Sihah (Taj al-Lugha wa-Sihah al-Arabiyya) of al-Jawhari

al-Sihah: Taj al-Lugha wa-Sihah al-Arabiyya ("The Sound: Crown of Language and Sound Arabic") is an Arabic dictionary by Abu Nasr Isma'il ibn Hammad al-Jawhari, compiled at Nishapur for Abu Mansur Abd al-Rahim al-Bayshaki, according to Bakri Shaykh Amin. ¹ Al-Jawhari arranges its roots in chapters by their last radical and, within each chapter, by the first, then the second, then the third letter. ² Its editor Ahmad Abd al-Ghafur Attar calls it "the first dictionary to take the greatest step in lexicography known to the history of Arabic", as Prince Fahd ibn Abd al-Aziz quotes him in his foreword. ³

Attar divides the Arabic dictionaries into schools, among them that of al-Khalil in al-Ayn, that of Ibn Durayd in al-Jamhara, that of al-Jawhari in al-Sihah and that of al-Zamakhshari in Asas al-Balagha — a division he says was not current before his own introduction to al-Sihah. ^{4 5} He holds that al-Jawhari reached his method after studying his predecessors': he did not adopt al-Khalil's because of its difficulty, nor Abu Ubayd's topical arrangement in al-Gharib al-Musannaf, nor Abu Amr ibn al-Ala's arrangement by first letters in Kitab al-Jim. ⁶ The great dictionaries after him followed his method, among them Ibn Manzur's Lisan al-Arab, al-Firuzabadi's al-Qamus and al-Saghani. ^{7 8}

Bakri Shaykh Amin summarises the merits Attar finds in al-Sihah: it seeks the sound and undisputed, is easy to use and concise, explains elegantly, cites fine poetry and genuine Arab speech, attends to grammar and morphology, flags weak, rejected and abandoned usages, colloquial, post-classical and arabicised words, opposites and rarities, and attends to "greater derivation". ⁹ Among its faults, in Attar's view, is that it admits only what al-Jawhari thought sound, so that he dropped words that are in fact sound: al-Jawhari has about forty thousand entries, while al-Saghani gathered more than sixty thousand in al-Takmila wa'l-Dhayl wa'l-Sila; others are misreadings and corruptions in some verses and entries, misattributions between scholars, confusion in attributing poetry, and misplaced entries, such as putting "thayyib" under th-w-b. ¹⁰

Hamad al-Jasir disputed al-Jawhari's originality, arguing that al-Bandaniji had preceded him in Kitab al-Taqfiya; Attar rejects this and holds al-Jawhari the originator of his method; the views are set out under Did al-Jawhari originate the arrangement of al-Sihah?. ^{11 2}

Bakri Shaykh Amin, following Attar, says al-Sihah came down by three routes: through al-Bayshaki, for whom it was written; through Ibn Abdus, with whom al-Harawi studied it; and through the copyist who made a fair copy of what remained in draft after the author's death; Muhammad ibn Tamim al-Barmaki also transmitted it while changing its order. ¹ Attar took as his base the manuscript in the library of Shaykh al-Islam Arif Hikmat in Medina, dated 686 AH, alongside that of al-Qadi al-Basri from the mid-fifth century AH and the copy in the Egyptian National Library. ⁹

• Ahmad Abd al-Ghafur Attar's edition: 1st, Cairo, 1376 AH / 1956; 2nd, Beirut, Dar al-Ilm lil-Malayin, 1399 AH / 1979, with a preface dated Mecca, Rajab 1399. ^{12 13}
• Dar al-Hadith's (Cairo) one-volume printing of 1430 AH / 2009, "arranged alphabetically by the first letters", revised by Muhammad Muhammad Tamir — a modern rearrangement that departs from al-Jawhari's own order. ^{14 15}