4to. Volume I: 636 pp., / Volume II: 582 pp., Arabic lithographic text within borders, some ink comments in margins, modern hard back binding, few wormholes affecting margins of some pages at the end of volume two, Al-Matba’a Al-Kubra Al-’Amira, Egypt, 1282 A.H. / 1865.

Synopsis

Abu Nasr Isma’il ibn Hammad al-Jawhari was a lexicographer and the author of a notable Arabic dictionary. His great work is the Arabic dictionary entitled Taj al-Lugha wa Sihah al-Arabiya, “The Crown of Language and the Correct Arabic”, also known by the shorter titles al-Sihah fi al-Lugha, “The Correct Language”, and al-Sihah. It contains about 40,000 dictionary entries, which he wrote when living in Nishapur. It is told that he had not completed the work by the time of his death and instead, it was completed by a student. Al-Jawhari put the words into an alphabetical order under which the last letter of a word’s root is the first ordering criterion. Al-Sihah is one of the main Arabic dictionaries of the medieval era. Moreover, much of its material was incorporated into later Arabic dictionaries compiled by others. Abridgements as well as expansions of it, were produced in Arabic over the centuries.
A fully searchable online edition is at Baheth.info. Most of it was copied into the huge 13th century dictionary compilation Lisan al-Arab, which is also online at Baheth.info.
E. Scheidius began an edition with a Latin translation, but only one part was published in Harderwijk (1776). The whole has been published in Tabriz (1854) and in Cairo (1865), and many abridgements and Persian translations have appeared. In 1729 its dictionary entries formed the basis for an Arabic-to-Turkish dictionary that was the first book printed using printing press by Ibrahim Muteferrika in Ottoman era.