Effel Arabic Dictionary - Search tips

Introduction

This page gives some tips on how to search through the dictionary successfully. I found that if people read through the tips presented on this page, they are much more successful at finding the information they need.

A dictionary is not a translation service!

Effel Arabic Dictionary is a dictionary and not a translation service. Searching for an English sentence will not give you any results. There are plenty of online translation services on the internet. If you need an instant translation of a text, try your luck elsewhere.

Leave out the 'al-'

Be aware that arabs write a word and its article (اﻟ) as one word. Be careful to leave out the article when searching for an Arabic word, as it will get you no results.

English -> Arabic: if you can't find it, try a synonym

The dictionary was set up as a tool for translating Arabic text into English. Of course it can also be used to find the Arabic translation for English words, but bear in mind that even some frequently used English words may not be in the dictionary, simply because I used a synonym for it.
For example: say you are searching for the Arabic word for 'big'. If the dictionary does not find any matching entries, try searching for 'large'.

Try searching by stem!

If you have some knowledge of the Arabic language, you probably know that most Arabic words are based on a limited number of consonants, often referred to as the stem of the word. For example, the word for library مكتبة is derived from the stem كتب, which means 'to read'. Words derived from the same stem often have related meanings.
Searching by Arabic stem rather than for a specific word has a couple of advantages: