Towards a historical dictionary for Arabic language

Abstract

A historical dictionary is a language dictionary which studies the evolution of the construction of words and their meanings through the chronological stages the language has undergone. However, despite its richness, Arabic does not yet have a historical dictionary which helps to monitor its semantic development throughout history and to understand its knowledge and scientific heritage properly. The creation of such a dictionary should pass through several stages and requires a lot of effort. The most important step consists in determining a particular word sense in a given context which basically identifies the relevant meaning of a word according to the historical period in which it appeared. In this work, we suggest a dictionary of meanings that allows us to capture the semantic evolution of each Arabic word by focusing on the date of its first appearance and the way their meanings have evolved. Our method aims to provide relevant information about the oldest date of use of a given word, as well as its meanings, users, and sources. So, one of our major contributions of this paper is to determine the meaning of Arabic words according to where they appeared based on precise documents and contexts.