Development of an electronic arabic dictionary

Abstract

Currently, the arrangements of common Arabic dictionaries are based on the first letter of the words according to the Arabic alphabet sequence. For this ‘Electronic Arabic Dictionary’ it is developed based on the arrangement of Hans Wehr Dictionary edited by J. M. Cowan. Since published in 1964, this dictionary is the only one that has been arranged according to the Arabic root word. So far, there is no electronic version for this dictionary format. Therefore, the objective of this project is to develop the software format for Hans Wehr dictionary and as the first step is to design the database structure based on the root word arrangement concept. The content of this electronic dictionary is fully based on the Hans Wehr dictionary content. Besides providing the meaning for each word, this dictionary also gives information about the root word derivation forms, derivation words and their usage examples.