Abu Nasr Isma'il ibn Hammad al-Jawhari () also known as Imam al-Jauhari (died 1002 or 1008) was a medieval lexicographer and the author of a notable Arabic dictionary al-Ṣiḥāḥ fī al-Lughah ().
Life He was born in the city of Farab (Otrar) in Transoxiana (in today's southern Kazakhstan). He began his studies of the Arabic language in Farab, then studied in Baghdad, continuing among the Arabs of the Hejaz, then moving to northern Khurāsān, first to Damghan before settling finally at Nishapur. It was here that he met his death in a failed attempt at flight from the roof of a mosque, possibly due to delusions of being a bird.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 He was the second person to have attempted after Abbas Ibn Firnas.
Works Taj al-Lugha wa Sihah al-Arabiya () "The Crown of Language and the Correct Arabic" - His magnum opus dictionary of Arabic; often abbreviated as al-Sihah fi al-Lugha, "The Correct Language", and al-Sihah ().Sprenger, p82 It contains about 40,000 dictionary entries.History of Humanity, edited by Muḥammad ʻAdnān Bakhīt, year 2000. The section headed "Grammar and Lexicography" written by Ahmad Yusuf Al-Hasan. 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 compilation Lisan al-Arab; published online at http://www.baheth.info .Book Arabic Lexicography: Its History..., by John A. Haywood, year 1965, chapter six: "The Ṣaḥāḥ of al-Jauharī". A fully searchable online edition available at Baheth.info . Edition begun by E. Scheidius with a Latin translation, but one part only appeared at Harderwijk (1776). Complete edition, Tabriz (1854). Complete edition, Cairo (1865). Many abridged and Persian language editions.See library catalogs at Classify.OCLC.org. Also C. Brockelmann, Geschichte der arabischen Literatur (Weimar, 1898).
In 1729 Ibrahim Muteferrika's Arabic-Turkish dictionary, based on Jawhari's, became the first book to be printed by the printing press of Ottoman era.The al-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 publisher Ibrahim Muteferrika. Further information at ref .
References
Bibliography
Book Arabic Lexicography: Its History, and Its Place in the General History of Lexicography, by John A. Haywood, 1965.
External links Encyclopedia Islamica