Gharīb al-Qurʾān fī Shiʿr al-ʿArab
غريب القرآن في شعر العرب
Attributed to ʿAbdullāh ibn ʿAbbās · Answers attributed to Ibn ʿAbbās (d. 68 AH / 687–8 CE); recorded versions from the late 9th–10th c. CE · Question-and-answer glossary
Nothing here is arranged like a dictionary. Each entry is a small scene: a questioner — in the story that frames the collection, the Khārijite leader Nāfiʿ ibn al-Azraq — asks Ibn ʿAbbās what a word in the Qurʾan means, receives a gloss of a few words, and presses: “Do the Arabs know that?” The answer is always a line of poetry. Read it as an early record of how single Qurʾanic words were explained and then defended from Arab speech: a text attributed to Ibn ʿAbbās and shaped by those who handed it down, not a lexicon he wrote.
All the classical dictionaries