Talk:List of English words of Arabic origin (A–B)

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Baphomet[edit]

Baphomet gets 14 online dictionary hits at OneLook. It's certainly there in my printed copy of the Shorter Oxford. I don't know why it can't be found here but to say "the word is not in ANY of today's dictionaries" is clearly wrong. SamuelTheGhost (talk) 14:02, 21 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The results you're linking to at OneLook.com are nearly all coming from one source, the year 1913 Webster's Unabridged Dictionary. (And the Wikimedia Wiktionary is the other source). Let us define "today's dictionaries" as all general-purpose dictionaries that have been updated within the last 25 years. Since nearly all of them are online today, it's easy to verify that none of them lists "baphomet" as a word. Most of them are listed at List_of_English_words_of_Arabic_origin#General_references :
...and here are two more of today's dictionaries:
  • Chambers.co.uk – has the online copy of Chambers Dictionary year 2011 edition (Chamber's 21st Century Dictionary), 1664 pages long (has substantial market share in the UK).
  • YourDictionary.com – has the online copy of Webster's New World Dictionary (which I think has substantial market share in the USA), year 2004, 1728 pages in the printed copy, has entries for 160,000 words. It's not compiled or published by the same organization that does the Merriam-Webster Dictionary.
Seanwal111111 (talk) 22:03, 21 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]
You seem to be trying to say that "baphomet" used to be a word, but now it isn't. It still gets over 100,000 gooogle hits. In any case, you are certainly making up the rules about dictionaries as you go on. This is wikipedia, remember, and our criterion is WP:RS. I've told you that the word has an entry in the Shorter Oxford Dictionary. That's a Reliable Source. Noboody's suggesting that baphomet is a very common word in everyday conversation, so its non-appearance in small and medium-sized dictionaries is irrelevant. SamuelTheGhost (talk) 15:02, 22 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]
If you investigated the sizes of the above dictionaries, you'd find they're all large. They all have more than 100,000 words. E.g. the link to the Random House Dictionary goes to the unabridged Random House Dictionary which has 300,000 words. The link to the Concise Oxford English Dictionary has 240,000 words.
I'm not saying that "baphomet" isn't a word. I'm saying that it's easy to demonstrate its absence in virtually ALL of today's dictionaries and this is one way to demonstrate to you that it's a very rarely used word. The list explicitly excludes very rarely used words. Hundreds of words that almost nobody has heard of are excluded from the list. You can see a big collection of those rare words in the book http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=MiNWi1g3fJ4C&printsec=frontcover , some of which are also at http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:English_terms_derived_from_Arabic .
Another thing that's excluded from the list is proper names. E.g. Gibraltar is a proper name, of Arabic ancestry, and a well-known name, not included in the list because it's a proper name only. The term "Baphomet" with a capital "B" is used as a proper name more often than it's used as a lower-case ordinary word. I repeat, it's use in some lower case usage is very rare and that's why it doesn't belong in the list. Seanwal111111 (talk) 21:01, 22 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  • I am familiar with the dictionaries above. When discussing English-language dictionaries I would reserve the word "large" for multi-volume publications, and describe those above as medium-sized, even though one of them describes itself as "concise".
  • Baphomet clearly isn't so very rarely used, if you just look at Baphomet and Baphomet (disambiguation) and over 100,000 google hits.
  • The entry you twice deleted from the list had "Baphomet" with a capital "B". I have never attempted to characterise it as a "lower-case ordinary word". Here, at last, however, you have a point: a comparable case might be "Aladdin", which I see is also absent from the list. If that is to be the policy, it needs to be more clearly set out in the preamble. It would be nice, however, if somewhere there was a list of Arabic-origin proper names with well-established English-language forms, such as Baphomet (perhaps), Aladdin, Saladin, Gibraltar, Cairo, etc etc. SamuelTheGhost (talk) 15:26, 23 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Emir[edit]

Already mentioned in list under "admiral": "أمير amīr, military commander, also Emir. Online Etymology: "among Arabic or Muslim peoples, "chief of a family or tribe; a ruling prince," 1590s, from Arabic amir "commander" (see admiral)." https://www.etymonline.com/word/emir?ref=etymonline_crossreference 2A0A:A540:A3FD:0:CB6:4CD0:E0D6:DB1C (talk) 14:41, 27 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Notes on coming edits[edit]

Hello all,

We are working in Arabic Wikipedia to record the original Arabic words for all the words in this list, the workshop page can be found here, commons category for all the recordings can be found here.

We will start adding the files to the list today using the following prototype: 

{{IPA|[IPA symbols here]}} ({{pronunciation|File name here|listen|help=no}})

Please consider that there might be a lot of Edits from Arabic users for this page in the following 2 weeks.

I will follow each of them, to keep the page in perfect form.

If you have encountered any problems in this regard, or if you have any comments, please feel free to visit my talk page.

--Michel Bakni (talk) 09:59, 23 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]

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