Thread by @yakabikaj

Quick thread 🧵 with my 10 favorite online resources for reading Arabic

Thread inspired by @deepcutiqtibas 's tool Ishtiqāq, which allows you to run a wildcard search for words when you aren't sure about one (or more) of the letters - very useful when reading hard-to-decipher manuscripts

https://x.com/deepcutiqtibas/status/1805731816180969622

Although designed for Ottoman Turkish, I use LexiQamus for the same thing (deciphering words in manuscripts). Since Ottoman has tens of thousands of Arabic loans, it can still be useful for reading Arabic (or Persian, etc.) lexiqamus.com/en

The most indispensable dictionary for me is Arabic Almanac which lets you quickly search Hans Wehr, Lane's Lexicon, Lisan al-ʿArab, Steingass, and other dictionaries by root ejtaal.net/aa

The Living Arabic project is another great way to search multiple dictionaries. It's especially good for colloquial Arabic, but its classical Arabic dictionary is also useful as it allows you to search full words, not just roots livingarabic.com

If you aren't great at Arabic morphology (ṣarf) and can't always analyze a word and break it down into its parts, Aratools is essential. You can search by word, even if fully conjugated with prefixes, suffixes, etc. and still get a definition and the root aratools.com

The Doha Historical Dictionary is an amazing resource for looking up the history of a word and its earliest attestations - something like the Oxford English Dictionary, but for Arabic dohadictionary.org

For anything Qurʾan related the Quranic Arabic Corpus is incredible. You can read or search the entire Qurʾan with syntactic and morphological details for every single word, and much more. I love the syntax trees for every verse corpus.quran.com

For rarer words, the Arabic Lexicon is a great way to search additional dictionaries - crucial for reading classical texts arabiclexicon.hawramani.com

What about when you need to look up an idiomatic usage of a phrase? You can search words or entire phrases in Reverso
and in Glosbe context.reverso.net/translation/ar…
glosbe.com/ar/en

Finally, I have to plug Anki, the best flashcard app out there. Whenever I look up/learn a new word in Arabic, I make a flashcard for it. I've used Anki consistently, rarely missing a day since I first got hooked in 2011, and it has helped me enormously apps.ankiweb.net

There are tons of other resources out there, but these are my favorites—I use several of them pretty much every day when reading Arabic. Hope they'll prove as useful to you as they have been for me!