Asās al-Balāgha
أساس البلاغة
al-Zamakhsharī · d. 538 AH / 1144 CE · Dictionary of eloquent usage
The Asās al-Balāgha is less a list of definitions than a collection of phrases, sorted in two. Under most roots al-Zamakhsharī first gives the word's concrete, everyday uses; then, after the words وَمِنَ الْمَجَاز wa-min al-majāz, "and among the figurative uses", he gives the phrases in which the word has been carried somewhere else. For a reader of the Qur'an it is a map of a word's images, and a record of where one twelfth-century scholar drew the line between literal and figurative.
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